Boat Ride

He has been on the boat for nearly six months now. The journey from the country he had called home for eight years has been hard and difficult, not only because of the sea and the utter boredom of the ride, but also because he missed that country. Now he could see in the offing a hint of Hong Kong harbor, that chaotic colony ceded not too long ago. It would be such a strange welcome, the chaos, the stink, the danger, different in every way from where he had left off before getting on the ship. New England was a place of tranquility, had an atmosphere of civility, a place for the learned, and represented a country of boundless and bottomless ideas and innovation. Yung, being the first Chinese to have graduated from an American college, felt a bit of the remaining pride in taking that place in history, but now that degree, tucked nicely in his suitcase, means nothing much for his future, at least not to his knowledge.

On the boat he had met a few Chinese merchants. They told him stories about what had been happening in China the past eight years, more chaos, more humiliation by the foreigners, more corruption. In fact, a war was brewing, raised by a Christian rebel. He thought about his Christian education, and the experience with Christians in New England, of which there were many (actually all of them were professed Christians). He thought it was strange that Christians were waging war in the backyard of his family. But even more shocking was how little he knew Chinese. He could have a conversation with these people, but every time they tried to show him something written, he couldn't understand most words. They were amused, shocked, or disappointed. Being the first Chinese to graduate from the US, and from Yale, no less, suddenly was a minus point when he couldn't even read the language of his native tongue. He was always embarrassed in front of these merchants, though in private he was very angry.

Now he saw the distant gray city of a colony in the horizon and he wondered what the future held for him. All this love and discipline he had learned from Christianity, a religion he never really accepted, meant nothing to him now. Neither would be Confucianism, which he had even less education about. He had left home to go to a missionary school at the age of seven, and ever since then there was little contact with Chinese culture. No wonder he couldn't read Chinese, but it didn't matter what he understood; his native culture, which was about to re-embrace him, had a lot of complaints to make.

His feelings had been written down in his memoir that he started the second week he had been in sea. It was a way for him to live a bit longer a past that was drifting away like the thick smoke that was bellowing from the humongous chimney above. He recalled his departure from China, then his arrival in Mondon, Massachusetts, the high school years, and the fondest of all, his years at Yale. His first classes, his first sports activities, his first induction into his fraternity, and it was all the "first" for China. But for a while he had forgotten how Chinese he was, at least in his memory. He looked different from others at first, but by the time he had entered Yale he had cut off his queue and suddenly became a modernized man.

Some nights he cried as he wrote the stories, his feelings, when memories leaped into his head and yanked open the floodgate of feelings. He had to restrain himself lest his roommates get woken up. He would leave the room and go out to breathe the chilly sea air. In the total darkness of the world around him he would let his tears flow freely but not utter a single sound. Now that he saw more and more clearly the island, first the Victoria Peak where the wealthy live away from the poverty that engulfed them, then the junk ships that stray from the island seeking something positive momentarily in the abyss of the world, and he knew that soon he would feel the slowing down of the ship, and see the harbor he had been dreading for some time now. He was still wearing his New England outfits, rather warm for the climate here but not uncomfortable. He was a modern man, a modern Chinese man who had grown up in a Western world longer than he had been in China.

He walked back into his quarters, where his roommates had already left with their luggage, probably already standing out near the exit. He gathered the remainder of his belongings still outside the suitcase and stuffed them in. The realization that his Yale diploma was in that suitcase brought a slight pang to his heart. And yet, somehow, he clenched his teeth and said a short Christian prayer. He didn't know what Chinese people would say in such circumstances, and though he didn't believe in Jesus, he asked that he bring him comfort as he embarked on a new journey in an old world that was completely new to him.

He sat down and waited until the thunderous horn was blown as the ship pulled into the stinky harbor.

Yale Tango Club Leadership

The Yale Tango Club was started in 2003 by a group of graduate students who had taken interest in Argentine tango after having taken classes at the Payne Whitney Gym at Yale. The founder and first president was Tine Herreman, who was a graduate student at the Genetics Department at the time. She would lead the club from infancy to becoming a top university tango organization in the world during her five year presidency.

She had opened up the presidency to elections, but no candidate was found to challenge her, though many were willing to be vice-presidents. Part of the problem was that her success was hard to match, and the responsibilities she was carrying was too daunting for the officers in the club. And so, she continued to be the president until shortly before leaving graduate school.

As president, Tine did just about everything. She was a frequent teacher before the club, under her financial planning, had the money to invite guest teachers. She organized the so-called bootcamps that quickly inducted new people into the tango world by showing how, only after a few hours, anyone could dance to tango. She often taught at those bootcamps. She also did much of the promotion. While these events happened every couple of months, a more regular and demanding task she undertook was the running of the Sunday practica, four hours of music during which people of all levels dance and practice to improve their levels. Until a year before she had left school, she was the only DJ for each Sunday's practica. She would unlock the doors, set up the speakers, and play music until it was time to close shop. She would also decorate the place, to give it some warmth for especially people who were still skeptical about whether they belonged in the Argentine tango world. But her work would start before the doors were unlocked; she had to prepare music. Granted, by the middle of her tenure there, she had started DJing for other events in the Tri-State area. Her fame was becoming more widespread and growing, and she often used the club's practica as a test tube of any new DJ ideas.

However, eventually, the pressure was too much, compounded by the pressure for her to actually graduate from school. And despite the failure of finding a replacement, she decided to simply not run anymore, forcing the club to come up with a new president. And despite her immense contribution to the founding and growth of the club, there was growing internal discontent among the officers, some of whom found her demanding tactics on the borderline with dictatorship. She, on the other hand, thought the club too frail, too childish, couldn't stand on its own, always relying on her to figure things out. It was partly this conflicting relationship that expedited her decision to end her role as the president there. But before she stopped, she had to realize an immense project that would expand her reputation greatly as a tango organizer. What was better than being the founder and promoter of the largest student-run tango club after Michigan's? It was organizing a tango festival. So in 2006, she organized, with the help of a large group of fellow tango dancers, her first festival. It was a resounding success in terms of surpassing expected number of attendees and projected profit. She used her meticulous skills as an organizer, her connections built over the years with people in the Northeast, dancers as well as teachers, and in the end, Yale Tango Club was on the top list of tango festival locations. It attracted a great number of young people, which was the new trend in Argentine tango that, until recently, had attracted mostly older people. Also, the fact that its admissions prices were still lower than most other festivals, given that all the venues were free to the organizers, attracted even more young people of student backgrounds.

Tine reaped a great deal of benefits from having successfully launched the first festival. And she would outdo herself in the subsequent annual festivals, even though she would no longer be the president. The presidents that followed her would no longer be bearing the full set of responsibilities she had carried with equal measures of pride and reluctance. The responsibilities were distributed to other positions, particularly the treasurer, but also to volunteer organizers, promoters, marketers, and DJ organizer. The last position became important when it was clear that Tine had burned herself out being the DJ every week and not dancing very much at the same time.

While the distribution of work meant less of a load for the presidents, none of them shared the enthusiasm or the motives that drove Tine to success. Any given president did not always attend the Sunday event. Key access was given to at least two other people, and so the president isn't always needed to open for the practica. And the lack of ideas also drove down innovation. How to attract more people, creative ways to raise morale, nothing was new. The new presidents simply took whatever Tine had come up with and did the same thing. And each new president didn't last very long, one lasted just a little more than a month.

Doing what Tine had set a foundation to sustain the club is not that simple itself. Finding space for the monthly classes, dealing with the space given to the club free of charge by the Graduate and Professional Students Society can become a huge headache. And unlike Tine, the new presidents actually had to put at least as much focus on their studies. This might explain why the current president has lasted so long. He used to be a teacher, when he started as president, but now is a postdoc, with a bit more time on his hands. He is basically riding still on the wave of success generated by Tine's time. But he does it very effectively, and it is partly for this reason that the club has seen a resurgence of membership and interest.

The Yale Tango Club will see its fourth tango fest in less than two weeks. It is also organized by Tine. While her tactics and attitudes were not always welcomed by people at the club, they worked, at whatever expense, in bring fame to the club and put it on the map. Event though she had left the club many years ago, the club's leadership still finds itself standing on her shoulders, which apparently are tall enough that they need no climb any higher.

The Unibrow Boy

His whole body resembles a caricature of an space alien. His head, all bald, nearly resembles an upside-down pear. His torso is much the same, broad on the shoulders, and slowly tapering off towards the hips. His limbs are skinny. He is, however, very fit. He is walking out of the fitness center, barely catching his breath. He had a good workout.

Two girls of his age walk by and they try not to stare at him, and can barely contain their giggles or show of awe. His face is entirely hairless, but its a young face. The only feature that stands out so much is his unibrow, or what appears to be a unibrow. Without careful inspection, one would miss the tiny space that separates the two eyebrows, which are thick and dark. His natural hair color, then, is probably black.

His eyes are big, but they are overshadowed by the unibrow when one looks at him. He is aware of this but does nothing about it. He is no longer self-conscious, though he is aware of how those girls, and others, must be feeling around him. His face is a curiosity to look at, and if he were in a different country where staring wasn't so impolite, he would be attracting a big enough crowd for someone to make money from.

Right now he is slowly catching his breath. His skin is slowly drying up, the sweat doing its job of cooling the body through evaporation. He is keenly aware of the changes his body is going through as it returns to a normal state after a long, hard workout. He takes the stairs down, just as he took them to come up the four flights, except that now he can feel the slightest movements and complaints in the most minute muscles, especially in his legs, the focus of today's workout. He feels tired from the shoulders, those broad shoulders that make him look like an alien wearing a ridiculous suit of broad shoulders.

A woman comes up the stairs. She has her headphones plugged into her ears. When she looks up to see him, she pauses a little. He must look even more strange with one of the wall lights of the stairwell shining directly behind his upside-down pear shape head. He wonders if she can see his unibrow and his shiny head in the silhouette. He notices that she is quite pretty. He doesn't recognize him, though he is pretty sure he has seen her somewhere, perhaps in one of the buildings where he and his peers go to classes. He has not seen her in the gym before. She has long, dirty-blond hair, dark blue eyes, and olive-brown skin. Maybe she's a Latina, or Mediterranean. He is sure. She is wearing a T-shirt with some logo on it that he can't understand, and sweatpants with the name of their university on it. It is a quick encounter where he gets to observe her calmly while she is surprised, at the very least, at seeing such a strange creature descending from the lights.

He continues his descent, and before he got to the first floor, he encounters an older man in a T-shirt that says "The End is Nigh... So Party High!". He wonders if the old man, who looks like a professor if you can imagine wrapping him in a suit, got his T-shirt from a son, or one of the students. He has a white goatee, curly salt-and-pepper hair. The old man looks at him for just a split second and then looks back down at the stairs that he has been climbing. The unibrow young man frowns a little, which makes his unibrow look ever more like a single brow. After the older man has passed him he turns around and says, "Excuse me." That does the trick of stopping the old man and making him turn around, their eyes meet. Now the light is casting down onto the hairless-except-the-unibrow face of the young man. It's nearly glistening, shiny, from the film of sweat that is slowly evaporating. The old man has a chance to see this wonder two steps down from him. Before he asks what the young man wants, he thinks for a bit, and then says, "Ah, Yuri. How are you?" Yes, he must recall that this is Yuri the Unibrow boy.

"I am doing fine. Long time no see. I almost didn't recognize you," says Yuri. But he knows the doctor very much recognizes him. After all those sessions, the doctor surely already knows the exact width of the tiny space between the two eyebrows, to the picometer. The doctor is no in his suit anymore, and his hair isn't done in the usual way. Also, more of his flesh is showing. He must be going to the fitness center.

They exchange a few more greeting-related words, and the awkward moment of needing to say goodbye quickly surfaces. But before their departure, Yuri says, "I am doing much better now. I have you to thank the most." Does he? He becomes self-conscious suddenly because their conversation is an echo in the stairwell. Although he has no friends and hardly any of his classmates even know he exists, he is still a little self-conscious.

"I am glad you've turned a corner," says the doctor, smiling.

Yuri bids farewell to his former shrink and turns around. He doesn't want to see this man again. He doesn't want to remember anything, and the feeling of cold, of finding himself shaking, bothers him immensely. He quickly runs down the few steps left before hitting the ground floor, no longer noticing the complaining muscles or the fatigue. By the time he reaches the reception, he can see the outside through the long hallway. It's sunny outside, in contrast to the rain when he entered the gym an hour ago. He feels a need to be outside and hide in the anonymity of the city.

Head Lights

I woke up from my stupor to the sound of windshield wipers squeaking before me. The windshield is an oscillation between the image of dotted water and smeared water, in both cases distorting field of vision in front of us, the midnight highway, a dark canvas punctured by half a dozen pairs of headlights every now and then. The only other light sources are from the dashboard, from which faintly audible music is heard. I look to my right and saw a big truck that we were passing by.

Its huge headlights emitted a beam of light made visible by the rain.

All this made my wakeful state questionable. Was I really awake? It was too peaceful, too surreal. I looked out to the side window again and found that we'd passed the truck and that it was just darkness again. The sound of the tires rolling on the wet highway made for a soothing background noise. The squeaking sound of the wipers simply added more to the tranquility of the drive. I looked at my driver for a moment, who was engrossed in the driving. I don't know how she does it; driving itself was a soporific task for me. She noticed my stirring, looked at me for a moment, and then commented that I'd missed the part where it was snowing as we drove through the little mountains of Vermont. But then silence returned, at least the one accompanied by the humming sound in the background.

So I slumped back down in my seat, and allowed the wipers, which were visible against the reflection of our headlight's lights against the rain, hypnotize me back into my sleep.

Music and Dance Infused

In this small living room one wonders if he has entered an IKEA showroom. Everything, large items like the floor, the kitchen cabinets, the bookshelves (of different kinds), or small ones like the utensils, the cups, pots, and everything else in between like the faucets, everything, is from IKEA, and so easily identifiable from the Swedish corporate giant. But today, when I walked in, the IKEA showroom simply served as a unified background, like a cup, to the dance and music that was happening in the foreground, like the tea that was brewing in the cup. There was such energy, such happiness, on people's faces, on my faces. The energy is amorphous but you can feel it infuse into your pores. You can feel it infuse into the hearts of the people who had spontaneously started dancing in this IKEA stage. It's the music that had driven people to start this before I came in, and it's the music that was perpetuating the energy.

Currently a tall man with a lot of stuck-up curly hair is watching with extreme delight a couple dancing swing. The woman had become more at ease following the man who was leading to the sweet jazz of someone whose name escaped me. Her hands link and turn and wrap around her dance parter's, with their bodies intertwined within. The tall man with the hair and the others watch with a slight drunken sweetness in their smiles.

I sat down and I allow myself to submerge into this atmosphere of carelessness and unbound energy.

Being in a Hurry

How does time fly? I thought I had plenty of time, that I'd just be sitting here trying to figure out what I should do for hours and hours waiting for my driving buddy to show up. But then, I am finding myself scrambling for time to write a short short short story, which is turning out to be a journal entry.

Or an essay, hopefully, about time's obdurate rhythm that ignores my pleas and threats, which are based entirely on subjective desires, whereas time serves all, alive or not, at least not me.

The sun is yawning, like me when I resist sleeping. It is finding the horizon, covered here by the downtown buildings, rather attractive, like an overtired medical resident finds a bed after 36 hours of being kept awake by duties. But as it counts the seconds towards its daily burial on the horizon, I am rushing to slow down time by squeezing in more things to do. I wonder if I have forgotten something. I am here, in my apartment, with the sun's slanted rays illuminating the golden wood floor of my living room. Have I forgotten something? What I won't forget is to worry later, in the car, on our six-hour journey, that I might have forgotten something. Turning off the heat. Turning off the stove. Or, as the case almost had become, bringing my passport.

That would have been disastrous.

We have to do a better job at, what we all know, unfortunately, as, time management.

We some how have to manage time because we can't let it run away so easily. It is, unfortunately, that stubborn stallion that has its plan drawn out from now till eternity. It simply goes on in this amorphous way we try to measure, either with the setting of the sun or the ticking of our inventions like a clock.

But I am going to have to make this story short. It's part of the constantly, forever failed attempt to manage time. The hour has come and I still have to do one more thing. I worry that time is becoming a foreign land for me, the lord of his own space; it is moving away from me and whatever device I have to reign it in eventually reveals itself as a farce on my part. So what I will do.

What I will do. What I will do is to sit and let it go. Let it all go. It doesn't matter. As long as I can let it go, it will be fine. If I can find the patience and courage to just let time go it will, strangely, slow down for me.

So much for time management.

Cutting Clean

Most of us don't like breaking up relationships, especially not the platonic types, and even less so ones involving family. And when the breakup happens, it usually happens gradually, regardless of how much emotion and drama is involved. There's something innate in us that keeps us from wanting to break things apart so cleanly, so abruptly. This is perhaps one of the reasons we have such trouble with ending some romantic relationships.

I don't know exactly what the reason is for which we can't just turn around and walk away. I suspect that it has something to do with wanting to keep things we have built. Here I want to speak only about friendships, these so-called platonic relationships. Consider that you've spent a year with someone. You've spent time with them, interacted with them, grown to care about them, all these interactions nurture a connection between you and that person, a connection we often label as friendship.

But trouble always happen between people, and your first instinct, being so angry, is to stop talking to that person. If you're more mature, you might know somewhere in the back of your head that once the emotion passes, you can talk to that person, assuming the same thought goes through that person. Usually, you find some way of talking and give each other the attention. Or, you don't talk; you just go on with your lives and leave the problem unresolved. Or deeper, you don't even let the other person know that he has done you wrong. But it doesn't matter which is the case. At one point you will have to confront that person when it seems so impossible to be with that person. You are pushing each others' buttons so precisely, so frequently. But that's just one example of how things may simply not work anymore.

It doesn't have to be this way, but the longer you wait, the more likely it will happen, an impasse. I am speaking about this case of the impasse. You are friends, but you can't find a way to get out. And yet, that deep-seated desire in most of us to keep what we've built becomes louder. However, at the same time, the desire to quit also becomes louder. There's invariably an internal struggle inside you whose intensity is proportional to how strong this connection is. And the stronger it is, the harder it is for you to just cut it clean, turn around, and move on.

Isn't that the most rational thing to do? The perspective is that you've built something and you will keep it, as if it were some sort of precious tool that you should be proud of and would be useful to you in the future. However, friendships aren't tools, aren't prizes won, aren't trophies for display. They are a kind of experience. Every moment of friendship starts and ends with the moment in question, and if you were to simply turn around and not look back, you may not have the person with you anymore because you've expelled her from your life, but still you have the memory, the experience, and whatever lessons you've decided to bring along for the future. So I argue that it's irrational to keep a friendship for the sake of a product you want to keep.

There are very few people in the world who can throw away old stuff of sentimental values only. They aren't able to allow memories to be some abstract but realistic entity in their minds; they need objects to embody these memories. It's almost always true that if we, perhaps by force, throw away things we really don't need on any practical level but only on an emotional level, we don't miss them later, and yet should the memories they embody be re-invoked, those memories often feel even sweeter.

To keep a friend even when you've hit an impasse needs to have better reasons, and these reasons are quite rare and specific to each case. But for most people, in most cases, there are no reasons once an impasse has arrived. It's not unusual we reach this point. We are usually very different people, and our connection usually doesn't span beyond a year or two before we realize we've learned to push each others' buttons more than we can help each other remove them.

People, of course, abandon their friendships all the time, especially when we are younger. But you don't do it cleanly, and the older you get, to less clean you make things. While that internal struggle happens, you are simply dragging out the inevitable. You have the option between diving into the cold water or slowly moving in, even though, in the back of your mind, you know that the plunge isn't any worse than the slow torture.

There's also the idea that a clean cut is considered insensitive. In what way is it insensitive? Only in the way that no one else dares to do it, at least not most people. A clean cut seems to totally betray the love that has been nurtured between you and your friend. A clean cut seems worse than what enemies could do. And sometimes it is interpreted as childish, but if you ask someone how that is childish, they can't really give you a good answer. It's childish only if what you really want is to reconnect with that person and throwing a tantrum and threatening a clean cut is just a scheme for just that: reconnection. If you do this for the sake of your own sanity, the sanity of this human being you still love but can't stand being with or listen to any longer, than that is the right thing to do.

The difficulty is, like with breaking up a romantic relationship, that in almost all cases, there is still plenty of love in the friendship. And the love constantly makes you wonder if you're doing the right thing, if there wasn't a way to avoid pushing each others' buttons.

But it's important to remember that friendships aren't little trophies for collection, aren't stamps to be put in an album that you show off to someone. They are experiences that you should cherish, memories that would brighten your day in the future. And if you make a small mistake out of many right decisions, and that you later find yourself regretting losing that friend, life had been going on all the while, and your regret speaks more about some other parts of your life than about that loss. By then you should be cherishing the current experience with the current friends you have. Otherwise, you will just end up with a lot of friends, which means your buttons are being pushed constantly.

Puff Pastries

"How long does it take you to make the puff pastries?" the visitor asks.

"That takes the longest," says she. Her eye glasses have dipped a little lower on her nose bridge, and she watches the dough over the rims of her glasses. It is as if she were watching people doing something in the distance, but really, according to her, she's relaxed. She does this repetitive exercise every day, and it's not about being fun or being necessary, it's just, as she says, "occupationally therapeutic."

She is done rolling the pastry dough to an eighth of an inch thick. The sun is out again, but soon it will disappear behind the vast clouds above. But for the moment, the bright sunlight lights up the dining room, which is separated from the outside by a huge glass doors. The white tiles outside, the blue swimming pool, the palm trees, the pool side tables and chairs, all sitting out there, waiting, waiting for either someone to join them, or for the weather to become amiable to their existence. And she is waiting too, but not for anything in particular. She is already where she wants to be, but she isn't inactive; she is waiting.

The visitor looks away to see what's on TV. She has it on for background noise. Silence is a louder distraction than the mundane voices of soap operas. The visitor turns his attention back to her and remarks that she is now cutting perfect circles out of the thin sheet of puff pastry. She cuts out about 14 circular disks and removes the unused ones onto the side. The visitor quietly wonders what she will do with the unused ones. It's a lot of effort put in that pile of unused dough built at the far edge of the table, between them and the glass doors to the outside, which, by now, has resumed its shady state. The dog outside stands up, wags its tail a little bit, and circumnavigates the blue swimming pool. She lifts a small white tub that is meant for something else but has since been recycled to keep her different fillings. This one is the guava jam. She exerts some effort to open the tightly tightened lid, puts it on a nearby chair as there is no room left on the table, and puts the tub right next to her, on the part of the edge of the table that isn't covered by the wax paper she had laid down this morning when she started her work.

She stands up, hovers over the table a little, grabs the teaspoon resting nearby, and starts to scoop out the dark, red solid before shaking it off onto the center of each of the yellow disks. She isn't really thinking about the whole process. She isn't really thinking at all, at this moment. Her body is doing all the work, her mind is free for the moment. She notices the beautiful contrast between the red centers and the yellow surfaces of what she is making. After filling all the disks with the red delicacy, she retrieves the lid and tightens it on the tub of goodies. Having placed it on the same chair the lid was sunbathing on, because the sun is back again, she opens a Tupperware full of pre-sliced white cheese sticks. Each was made the previous day, each the size of the tip of the thumb. She places each white piece in the center, more of less, of the red jam. Now the color combination is even more splendid. She enjoys seeing her work come into the form she has expected but still admires. She smiles a little, and looks at the visitor, who is looking at what she's doing with admiration.

When she takes the mold that will help me finalize the creation of these mini pastries in the shapes of empanadas, he asks where she got the mold. It is an interesting contraption. You basically put the disk with the fillings on it onto the mold, then close the mold by folding it into a semicircle, sealing the disk with the goodies inside. That is what she does to each after wetting the edges with water from a small white bowl next to her. After every few folding she would put flour in the mold again to prevent the pastry from sticking to the mold. And after she closes the mold, she takes a knife, also waiting patiently on the side, to scrape off extra dough. The extra sliver of dough joins the pile of dough that isn't being used for these pastries. After opening up the mold she places the sweet empanada inside a plastic container. Her job is done for that one pastry.

Here she explains to her visitor the business she owns in selling these artisan sweets. She likes the company. She likes the interest in the man's voice. For her, standing there in the middle of the dining room, even if no sun shines to her right side through the glass doors, his inquisitiveness and patience is a constant light coming from the left. She glances at the two full boxes she had already made today. There are seven more boxes lying empty, also waiting. She thinks for a moment what other sweets she will make and for how many boxes, a momentary calculation. Then her mind goes blank again. Although she doesn't hear the swaying of the palm trees outside in the cool early spring breeze, she could feel the calm everywhere, she could smell spring from within. Her mind remains blank.

Winds Across the Sand

You dig your fingers into the beige sand and feel the odd resistance of the grains. And you feel the coldness beneath the shallow layer of warm sand. You feel the moisture the sun can't touch. And you slowly bring your fingers together into a claw shape.

Lift the fingers out of the sand and watch the grains disappear, falling out, and some clinging stubbornly to your skin. You forget about it for a little bit, letting your body automatically put your hand somewhere you aren't paying attention to, while you can look into the distance. The seaside has a simplistic landscape. It's the blue sea, marked by some white foams here and there, as sporadic waves crash and re-emerge. And on your left and right is just beige sand, dunes that stretch into infinity. You need not turn around because it's mostly dunes too. You sit in this simplicity, almost an abstraction of what life should be. Just the complementary colors of blue and yellow. And you sit there as a singular contrast to this simplicity because you've made yourself too complicated.

Invisible to this simplicity is the wind. It is only visible in the slight complication it makes, in the wave, in the movement of sand particles around you that are visible enough. And every now and then a gust would be felt, especially when it carries sand particles with you. Tickling your skin. And when you look at your forearm that had just been touched by the sandy breeze, you realize the sand isn't so simple. Each grain has a particular shape, particular color, and for some you can actually identify if it had come from an eroded shell or an erode rock. Life, in all its complexities, had its association in the sand, each grain, as if an iota of soul remains marked in the shape and color of each grain.

You brush off the sand and sighs, not because you have something on your mind, but because you are inspired by the simplicity of your surroundings, as if you just heard the simplicity sighing by making a breeze. You sigh also because you like the sound you make. It sound harmonious with the sea, with the waves that come waxing and waning before you. You sigh, because, it makes you feel good. It is as if your lungs infuse some of your troubles, some of your complexities, into that breath and let it out. As if each sigh is a tiny step in detoxification, in de-complication. And your sigh melts gently, diffuses into, the breeze that moves the sand, ever so slightly, over the infinity of history.

There had been others in history who have sat here, perhaps even in this very spot, a random spot you picked. They have looked out the sea with different perspectives, different desires, and in different states of mind. But still, they heard and saw the same thing, and it is likely that for a little bit, at least, they have been inspired to do the same thing you are. Digging their fingers into the sand, brushing it off from their forearms, and sighing deep breaths.

The sky isn't always so perfectly clear. Most of the time there are some clouds, and sometimes it's not blue at all, and often, it even rains. But even with all this, with thunderclouds, lightening, it's all still very simple. You dig your heels a little deeper into the soft sand before you, feeling the resistance and it small but enough to tire you out of you try running against it for a even a few minutes. And the deeper you successfully dig, the more your fingers on both hands want to do the same, and in the end, you feel like you are sliding into the sand, becoming part of it, being absorbed by the earth, and transforming into the sand so that the wind can lift you up and take you all over this simplistic landscape.

The wind picks up. The landscape is slowly transforming. While you're too busy wondering about becoming part of the earth, distant clouds have formed. It will rain tomorrow. The landscape will change, but not in any way that adds complications to its soul. You still have your fingers inside the sand; you still feel the little sand particles between your toes, around your heels. The smell of the sea is the smell of the future storm, the storm that will find its resting place underneath the thin layer of dry sand at the end. Your fingers feel the storms of yesterdays, or the tides of yesterdays. Millennia of history surround you, the only complicated existence in this landscape swept by the wind and caressed by the sea. You lift your fingers out and make gentle caresses on the sand to cover the mark you have left behind with fan-like patterns that the wind can't make but will soon remove.

A City from Movies

Miami, how different it is from other cities? How different it is from New York City, where I call home even though I don't live there? As we drove west with the sea behind us, into the sunset over the city whose skyline comprises skyscrapers as well as palm trees, I thought of the past 24 hours in Miami. It was, for me, the city of "Miami Vice", a TV show I have little recollection of because I didn't understand enough English about. I only remember Don Johnson and the black fellow. Neither one is particular noticeable now on any medium. I thought they were cool and the women in the TV were attractive. I had just entered teenage years.

But now, the city is more complex, and yet in many ways it is completely compatible with my youthful memories. The superficiality that is part of American culture is abound. There are countless Mustangs, one of the icons of American culture, at least one that I recall in my childhood. I had never even seen a Mustang, but I always associated it with coolness, a part of White culture I could only aspire to be a part of. Now I could see one every time I want to notice, and often when I wasn't even searching for one. They come in so many colors and shapes. Mustangs are just one type of cars that remind all visitors that this is a city of affluence, not only because of the wealthy New York jews that settle here for their retirement, but also of movie starts, Hispanic nouveaux riches, politicians, and many others we only think of from TV and movies. There are plenty of Jaguars, BMW, Mercedes, Corvettes, and many other cars that belong to the realm of the riche. When I drove down cross the inter-coastal, all I saw were giant yachts. My heart was awed because they belong to a world as unreal and foreign as if they appeared, not from behind the windows of the car, but on a silver screen. I am always amazed not only by wealth, but the gap between me and the few percentage of people on this planet that belong in that circle. This impressiveness are many folds and complex, but for now it was enough that I felt it.

Miami is superficial in other ways. The people on the beach are as much two-dimensional as the cars and yachts. On South Beach almost all beach people were young people with perfect bodies; women skinny in skimpy bikinis, and the men were all big, muscular, and towering over whatever girlfriend they had at the moment. There was some sense of pity for them, but then, who am I to express such opinions when I am hopelessly out of that circle of people. They were interesting to watch; they weren't necessarily good to look at, just interesting. I saw a girl wearing a simple bikini and a viking horn of two horns, attracting all sorts of attention. That's what was happening, no? Women dressed to get attention of muscular men. At my age, for the circle of people I hang out with, these human creatures in front of me are more foreign to me than most cultures I've encountered in my travels, and so much more superficial than most. They were young people (where were the old people?) who just wanted to be superficial. I wonder, did I miss my superficial years? At their age, I wanted to study, get homework done, and my only way to impress girls was to show my grades, my class participation. I don't really regret having missed any opportunities to live in such superficial life.

Not that I had such opportunities. I was born of a poor family and while I might not have much higher self-esteem than those muscular young men, I certainly have the money to impress girls with. Nevertheless, lucky as I might be, thankful I should be that I didn't lead such superficial life, I looked at this people with immense curiosity. They must have such different life perspective than me, and so I wonder always what they want from life, then, and ten years later, which is what I am now.

But I was here, on South Beach, watching the people, sitting on nearly snow-white sand, and beyond the superficial people was the turquoise water, calmer than yesterday. I was an immigrant child from the rough city of New York, at least it was rougher before. And here, there was the sun, the clean sand, the warm water, and people beyond my realm. I remembered the milonga last night. Instead of the usual tango performance, we saw a drag show of one man lip-singing to some oldie. That was Miami, representative? Not sure, as I've only been here for 24 hours. But it was strange. I am sure something like this *can* happen in New York, but I have never seen it, and never in a milonga. There are many questions I can't answer without living here, and all the superficiality belies something I won't comprehend by the end of the five-day weekend here. Nevertheless, I am impressed by everything I've seen so far. People can be so different form me even though we are from the same country. The weather is the envy of all Northeasterners. And the life of cars runs a deep and long river in our culture.

Heart of Gold

She had to hold on to her hat with her left hand to prevent it from being blown away by the wind while she finishes trimming the last bits of the rose bush. It was the start of summer in southern Florida. The sea breeze perfumed the garden that was part of the oasis in which they would make occasional escapes every summer. That was the image she still kept in her mind. That woman was her mother, a woman forever beautiful if not forever in her youth. A woman who always looked strong, well-anchored in her life, stood her ground against all adversities, exterior or interior. And in her image, while thinking about her mother finishing the last chores in the garden, she could hear tango music in the background, the really old stuff. The whole family always listened to it; it dominated the background of their lives, their minds. The music flowed easily through the synapses of their psyches, just as well the sea breezes that bathed the tranquil community where they had vacationed. And specifically, in the background, in her imagination now, was the song called "Corazón de Oro", "Heart of Gold."

This image might not have happened at all; very likely there was tango playing in the background, but probably not that particular song. But while she stood behind the fence, looking into the opening of the sea, she saw her mother holding on to her hat and she heard that song.

In that song a mother plays a pivotal role in the story, the story of growing up in a harsh life but learning, from the mother, to have a heart of gold, full of love, devoid of bitterness. And the voice of the woman singing just tears your heart apart with love that aims to release the love inside it. She thought of that song many times when she thought about her mother. The wind was coming from behind her, carrying out to the sea. This was the Golden Gate Bridge, the bridge she always felt most attached to. The sea was different from where her mother was clipping the roses. It was more blue, the air was colder, and here the openness of the sea was slightly constricted by the land on both sides of her view. In Florida she could look out to the sea from the cliff just outside their vacation house and would feel at once free and lost. Here, she felt she still had one leg in a troubling place attached to land but also had hope of an imminent liberty ahead.

The fence had been in place for a few years now, to prevent people from jumping off the bridge, the most popular bridge for committing suicide. There were phones everywhere under huge signs that urge would-be bridge-jumpers that help was available and that life was worth living. She stood within view of such sign and phone. She was standing in front of another such place a little less than a year ago. Despite the fence, there were ways to jump off the bridge. The fence just makes you want to think twice. It might have helped. And at that moment she didn't look much different than now. Her eyes were, perhaps, a little darker, more sunken, but its hopelessness wasn't as deep. She couldn't, at that point, bring herself to recall any happy memories as she did now. She drove to the parking lot where all the tourists went, except that it was in the evening, the sun had set an hour ago, the air was thickening with fog, and no tourists were in sight. The sea presented itself as a dark monster sighing below, a dark, invisible monster. She walked up the bridge, with quite a few cars passing by but they, like the monster below, were invisible creatures that didn't mind her at all. The fog made the bridge ever colder. She was walking up the eastern side of the bridge, which didn't look very red in the feeble mercury vapor light. The arch where she stopped looked more like a helpless giant that could do no more for her than bid her farewell. Its metallic coldness and static frailty was betrayed when darkness had stripped it of its superficial beauty given by the sun during the day. And at the foot of this giant, she looked out into the darkness. Yonder were glimmers of lights, some from the houses that lined the Oakland Bay, and then there were hints of that massive city of Oakland. She looked down and saw that some of the waves producing the sighing of the sea were visible in the light cast from below the bridge. She heard the beckoning of the monster below. She was facing the land whence she had driven, or was it the land that had driven her away, wanting very much to expel her to the sea she seemed so much to be a part of.

She wasn't thinking about anyone, not the least her mother or the tango music that infused the better parts of her memories. She wasn't thinking about the people who have maltreated her, the people she had held responsible for her downfall. She was simply feeling pain at least a magnitude greater than any physical pain she had experienced. She looked up the giant beside her once again and realized the fog had thickened so much that the outline of this helpless being had been blurred already. The anti-suicide sign and phone next to her didn't attract her attention. She stepped a little closer to the edge again, and her heart, so full of sorrow and yet still biological, started beating faster.

Was it out of fear, she wondered now. No, her heart wasn't the coward. Her heart was the strongest part of her body, especially that day. The song was still in her mind, repeating itself by moving back and forth to different parts. She touched wires that formed the fence, and slowly, the memory of that day faded like the fog and in its place the continuous image of her mother who, like the song, had given her a heart of gold. It wasn't perfectly shiny, it wasn't perfectly strong, but it was enough to keep her from making that final step into the darkness below. Her mother wasn't there, not even in her mind, to hold her back, but she had left her with a beating heart that defied the weakness of her body, of her mind. She was feeling the texture of the fence, its slight coldness, and she smiled as the memory of many conversations with her mother began to resurface, and in many of these conversations they were sitting outside, facing the mid-Atlantic, her hands on these metallic chairs, her fingers feeling the metallic surface, much the same feeling her fingers now felt.

Ten Thousand Years

The landscape is much the same as what he had seen in history books, in the imaginations of people from so long ago. The Earth has returned to its original grace, more or less. Lush forests, animals abound, the when it rains the droplets are sweet. He watches a group of large birds in the distance, slowly moving over the coastal area where the verdant plain meets the azure sea. The sun has just passed the zenith, its rays grace the gentle ripples of the sea with glitters. Across the bay is a peninsular where, so long ago, he first heard about the idea of eternal youth. That was where the university used to be.

He often comes here so he can remember that university, which now had disappeared over the past ten thousand years. His brain is full of memories, and senility is merely a word used for describing a symptom of some ancient time. His brain, like the brains of his friends and colleagues, is an bottomless bag of not only memory but thoughts and capacity to learn and understand. After ten thousand years they had all learned to find the equilibrium between this special species of which he is a member and the rest of the planet. He told his best friend the other day that he was watching an old movie that he remembered seeing when he was a child, before he crossed the line into the realm of eternal youth. It was what was then considered a science fiction. In the movie there were trains roaming along the sides of the skyscrapers, there were aliens, there were light-year traveling spacecrafts. But also, like so many science fictions of that era, there was gloom. The world was in chaos, there was greed, there was a need for salvation from mankind's evils. Pollution was abound, and human's appetite for more energy and more power was endless. Obviously, in their seemingly infinite wisdom now, he told his friend he understood why they had thought like that. He was part of that school of thought, and rightly so. They had to experience some form of the realization of that hopelessness. After all, they did go through an apocalypse of some sort that was caused mainly by that very avarice of human beings. But luckily, it didn't destroy the world or humanity. It just nearly did.

But what no science fiction at the time dared to imagine was what beauty had awaited them in the end. The end, as they can now see and experience, isn't some apocalypse, isn't some need to colonize other planets. The real end might be when the planet explodes, either from its own internal force or from a grave impact. Although they have the scientific knowledge to build spacecrafts to bail them out, or even quickly colonize other planets, they choose not to do so. This race of humans, evolved in the mind much more than their genes, have come to terms with their environment. They have accepted that they have found that equilibrium with nature, and that death isn't something to be feared, not even to make a big deal about. They no longer die from diseases, they no longer have a notion of famine, they no longer go about building anything, and for the past thousand years they have just let things disappear, absorbed back into nature as nature had designed. When natural disasters hit, some die, but many go on. Proper funerals would be made, but then it was little more than some celebration, without fanfare and yet without dread.

He looks much the way he did ten thousand years ago, give or take a year or two. He remembered the year, 2030. He was at that time about forty-five. They finally figured out how to let people live forever, and eventually they could wipe out all internal diseases like cancer, then one day the Nobel Prize was given to the person who understood the fundamental key to making the immune system always one step ahead of pathogens. He remembered all that. He loved to read, and he read everything, not just science. Everything. There are many writers now, not by profession because profession is no longer needed. People are doing whatever they wish to do. And they are brilliant at everything, and they get better everything at it. And since they have an eternity to do everything, they are never in a hurry to finish anything. This liberty from fear is the end. The savior isn't knowledge; they don't understand everything, but they have come to terms with their own ignorance and are very relaxed about it. They don't look back with remorse and never the future with dread. If anything, they look back with curiosity and the future with at least an iota of joy. They are all very confident people. That was the evolution of society, more important than evolution of the genes. They aren't afraid of any dark corner in their hearts. They have lived thousands of years, long enough to come to terms with anything.

He sees some movement in some nearby part of the forest below. Probably some sort of tree animal. He could hazard a guess on which one just by the nature and duration of the movement. He knows all the animals he wants to know, especially those he coexist. He has seen the return of many animals on the brink of extinction, but he had seen more animals that never returned. But he feels no regret. Right now he has all these wonderful creatures around him, some might be interested in tearing his flush apart and devouring him whole. But they wouldn't. They couldn't. He never worries about it. But he writes stories about it.

A seed in the shape of a parachute hovers in front of him. As if beckoning him. He takes it in his hand and looks at it. He knows of which tree this seed is. He caresses the wings on the seed. His brain quickly invokes a recent memory. And he smiles. There is a woman in his life. Actually in his heart. He has met many women in his life, and many, countless, had meant a lot to him. He has fallen in love in the deepest way more ways than he can count, though if he really wants to he can recall all the moments. But each one has been special, and after the end of each one, he felt less desperate. He remembers being very hurt after the previous one ended. But he also remembers how naturally his hurtful feelings flowed out along the river of his soul. He can still remember the endless, horrific pain he had experienced even when he was in his thirties. Now he could still feel intense love when he does fall in love, but when it ends, his life doesn't seem to stop long. He smiles at the thought that people ten thousand years, how suspicious they would be of him, probably accusing him of being the futuristic man who has lost his feelings, numbed his heart after ten thousand years. He remembers sitting in that university and his thesis adviser told him that if people really lived ten thousand years, wouldn't they just get bored. Yes, bored and also desensitized.

But not he. He loves everything around him. His people are the masters of the planet, as they always had been long before they let people live forever. But to be the master that doesn't feel any need to wield his power, this is what they have become and they know it. And in the same way, he has no desire to master his heart. He understands why he falls in love, why he falls out, why the ending is always, eternally, one can say now, so hard, so hurtful. But he never becomes bitter because he never feels a need to master his feelings. And in that same way now, he simply enjoys being in love. He is 45 by the standards of the ancients, but it doesn't matter now. Age is no longer relevant. She was 34 when she stopped aging. She is now just about his age, one can say, when measured in experience. And it's equally irrelevant to talk about when she is from; they have all been all over the world, through the different periods of the past ten millennia. They are from the earth. And so their identities aren't based on place or time, for locational and temporal identities are just two ways to express experience. They are identified by their own, different experiences. He has met her three times now. They spoke about their experiences, joked around, and listened. In the first meeting they couldn't understand each other well because of the language barrier. But by the second meeting, they were able to make jokes. And the last time they met they could even start understanding each other's thoughts. She is exciting to him. Her experience is like half of a jigsaw puzzle where you already can see what the story is more or less about and yet you know, even after ten thousand years, it is incomplete. And his half of the puzzle fits, he feels, so nicely with hers. It's like this landscape before him. While it is innocent, virgin in some way, this landscape, he personally knows, has experienced great changes, upheavals, especially in the past ten thousand years. And the sandy coast line is where the puzzle breaks off, so that she is the mysterious blue yonder and he is the green land, both pieces pregnant of possibilities and thoughts, and by being together they still would preserve their own identity, but being apart each would remain incomplete.

That is what he thinks. That is what he wants to share with her. He shares a lot of philosophical thoughts and ideas with his friends, both women and men, but with her, he finds himself wanting to share his heart, the words from his heart, not just from his mind. He isn't a poet like the ones he remembers reading during his schooling. He could see and now is absolutely sure that writers then were troubled people; they always had something they wanted to say in order for others to understand them. This hunger for understanding. He understands because he felt the same way for thousands of years, especially during the time when it was so sure that the world could truly come to an end and he found himself, still 45, alone, in the ruins of an apocalypse, wanting so much for a human touch, for the attention of a human heart. But now he is in love and he knows, without any second thought, that it is pure, that he has no need for anyone, but that finding someone to complete him is, better than a need, an excitement, much in the way that we are excited about nature's beauty without needing to conquer it, take it home, cage it. But love isn't the only reason he thinks about her. She is beautiful. She's exciting. There are about one billion of them on this planet, the same number, the same people, more or less, for the past few thousand years. He, unsurprisingly, knows quite a few, actually, close to a million peep, and he remembers all the faces. But she, he has never seen before. The attraction is deep. He wants her. He wants to be close to her, to hold her, to kiss her, to make love to her. Humanity had always fought between love and selfishness. And now that the latter had finally been vanquished, that fear had taken its rightful place outside the heart, he just wants to love her and show it. He is nervous, still, that she may not reciprocate, but while his mind understands the reasons he is still excited. It's the excitement that makes him nervous, not the let down, not the collapse of an ego.

He is still waiting for her to answer his message he had sent last night. He couldn't sleep the whole night, waiting for her to respond. He is still waiting. He did his special meditation to let off some of the stream from his excitement, his nervousness, and then he came here, on this cliff in the midway of the bay. He extends his arm whose hand is still gently holding the seed, and very soon a gust of wind carries the seed away from him. His eyes follow the path of the seed's flight, and then he notices the horizon. Clouds are forming afar. It will be a beautiful sunset. For ten thousand years, he had always cherished the sunset, even during one of the dark times when the sun couldn't pierce the muck that men had made in the sky. Her eyes were like the sunset, bright purple, with hints of gold. She was his nature, out there in the sea, shining over the land that is his ten-thousand year old soul.

Night Train

It had been raining for five days, and today was the first day anyone saw the sun. But more importantly, for Kevin, it was the first time he had seen the moon. It was a thin, golden crescent, hardly noticeable if you weren't looking for it. It was hanging in the clear dark sky over the little houses of the many residential neighborhoods the train traverses through. The light pollution in this densely populated part of New England has turned the clear sky starless, leaving the crescent moon ever more lonesome. He wasn't sure if the crescent moon had just passed the new moon phase or about to enter it. The color of the crescent was a dismal, golden color, no glitter, no shine, as if it were a sickle made of gold that once had glistened with glory but now had lost most of its glow. It was hanging as if it were a line stretched downwards by some dark, invisible weight.

This was a night train, and there were only two other passengers in the car with him. One of them had just finished talking on the phone, some sort of business transaction. That man's voice sounded very tired. The other man was now quiet, reading some printed material on laser printer paper. When he entered he had a huge luggage in one hand and phone in the other, talking about a meeting someone else had. It was ten o'clock, most people in these houses under the hanging, depressed moon were getting ready to go to sleep for yet another work day tomorrow. Kevin thought about his work for a little bit. He breathed out a sigh, wondering where that work was taking him in his life, or at least, how long it would accompany him through his voyage.

In this silence of the three passengers, there was only the humming of the train. It was loud enough to block out most of the noises from the outside, from the rails, from the winds. The light is soporific, but Kevin wasn't in the mood to fall asleep. He wasn't really going anywhere. He was where he wanted to be already, the train. He didn't need to sleep to get through the journey so he could wake up where he needed. He was at his destination, the train.

He looked out and saw in the pitch black canvas a cluster of lights moving in opposite directions on what must have been I-95. They looked like some roving fireflies in the late summer, though it was still late winter now. Or they looked like a squadron of fighter jets, on a mission somewhere. He heard a clinging sound. He turned and saw the conductor walk by. He was carrying a huge keychain, full of important keys to important locks protecting important secrets. The conductor was a young man, in his late twenties. As he was walking, he was rotating his ticket puncher in his index finger, as if it were a revolver, as if he were a cowboy in a Western, flipping a Colt-45 in his right hand. Although it was late winter, it was unusually warm, and like many people, the conductor was wearing a short-sleeve shirt, his uniform. The three passengers were not wearing short-sleeve. The two companions of Kevin were still in their business suits and ties. Kevin was still wearing his leather jacket with a faux-fur lining over two layers of long-sleeve shirts. His hands were folded. He noticed that they had a lot more wrinkles than he could remember. He remembered looking at his dad's hand, many decades ago, and saw wrinkles on them for the first time, and every time after that he had noticed more and more wrinkles, more and more lines that sometimes cut deep through the epidermis, causing some redness and even blood stains. These lines were different from lines on one's face. He remembered looking at those lines on his dad's hands and realized how much the old man had worked hard in his life. Now he was looking at his own, on his forty-five-year old hands.

And he thought about her. Would she mind? Would these lines bother her? Would she notice them? Yes, of course she would. He would notice lines on her face just as she would notice lines on his hands. He remembered her smooth, beautiful hands on his. That happened many times, including the last time they were together. That happened in the airport, with a lot of people milling around them, and the sun was outside, though hidden behind clouds that forebode torrential rain. This time, if she showed up, she would see his face, his graying hair, his wrinkles around his eyes, the whiskers of different shades of gray he had neglected or deliberately refused to shave off. He wasn't that old, but he was conscious of the passage of time, especially in the past nine years he hadn't seen her. He had once told someone that age is only in your mind, that how old you are depends on your attitude towards life. Yet, he never figured out how exactly to maintain a youthful attitude. He was afraid his heart had gotten old, and that she would notice. She was ten years younger than he was when they first met. And by the simplest logic, they were still ten years apart, but some people think as you get older the gap shrinks. And yet, in the end, he believed it still depended on how he saw himself.

He turned his hands to look at the palm. He remembered sitting with her, giggling, the two of them, with a fortune-teller in a village somewhere in India. She had picked the little bird to read her future. After the 5-rupee coin was dropped in the palm of the old man, he opened the cage and the little bird hopped out. The old man dealt one card at a time and the bird would brush away the ones he wanted to reject. When three cards were accepted, he lined them up again, face down still, and the bird paced up and down along the cards and then pecked on one. The old man flipped it over and it was a sign of a king, looking weary, holding his staff and sword not as symbols of power but support for his tired existence. He stumbled between English and Hindi, and the gist of it was that she would be with an older man (or just "old" man?) who held some power but really needed her. She giggled at the interpretation. He was amused too, but not as much. He didn't want the bird to read his fortune, even if it was all for fun. He had the old man look at his palm, read the lines and between them. And the mishmash of English and hindi more or less meant that he was constantly traveling on meandering and changing roads in life, sometimes of his own accord, other times he had no say in it. He was amused; he had always traveled, never really had a profession, not like his friends and siblings were were doctors and lawyers and of other professions. His heart sometimes felt meandering. They were just as amused that the fortune-teller and his little bird were telling them what was obvious based on their appearances. But still, at least for him, he was slightly moved.

That last meeting in the airport was a crossroad of some sort for him. He couldn't stay with her, he had to go on a different road she could not be part of, for whatever reason. In retrospect, the bird's interpretation and the old man's seemed contradictory, if the old man was him. The old king. Maybe she found another older man. He had broken her heart and at some point he had accepted that she would never forgive him for it.

Two more stops had passed, three more passengers had joined them in this late train to the big city. It was one of the airports in the big city where they had last seen each other. But that was not where he was going. If she didn't show up in this destination where he already had arrived, he would just take the next return train without leaving the train terminal.

The three passengers comprised another lone, business-looking man, and a young couple. The couple sat diagonal to Kevin. They were tired. They were in their mid twenties, but they were already tired. He was hanging onto her shoulders more than giving any semblance of protecting her. They slumped on the uncomfortable seat of this commuter train. The man's eyes closed first, and then the woman, having looked out into the darkness for a short moment, closed hers too. He thought about Janey. That young woman over there looked like her, if not for any other reason than that this young woman was about the same age that Janey was the last time he had seen her. They had different hairdos, different kinds of make up. It has been nearly a decade, he supposed. Thing must have changed. But the hint of her smile in defiance of her fatigue also reminded him of her. He hadn't thought about her in the past few years. After he had accepted that she would never forgive him he slowly started forgiving himself. And little by little he had stopped thinking about her.

The lone passenger that had just arrived was in the front section of the car, and Kevin could see him lifting his little luggage up to the overhead bin. He was about Kevin's age. He was amused to see that this middle-age man was also alone. Thee were too many lonesome people in this lonesome world. He was alone. For now.

It was a surprising message. It came in the form of a text message, on his phone. She still had his phone number. She didn't email him, she didn't call him, of course. But she sent him a text message. A simple, "how r u?". His heart was racing. What was he doing that moment. He remembered now. He was sitting in his car on top of the little mountain near where he was living. He remembered being there alone, in the freezing cold of the night, looking at the sky. The car was off, so he could breathe in and smell the cold air. He was looking at the sky, and there were enough stars defying the light pollution to show some glimmer in the apathetic sky. He wasn't thinking about her, of course. That was about a month ago. He was thinking about something else. He couldn't remember now. He just remembered how fast his heart was racing when he saw her name appearing on the phone. She was back in the country, with the same phone number. He was back in the country too. Their roads had diverted to different countries, but they didn't know what the other's road had twisted through, at least he didn't know hers.

Thinking about it, though it had happened a month ago, his heart was racing again. Then his thoughts were interrupted by the stopping of the train. The train had arrived in the last stop before going express into the city. If she didn't board on this train, then she might be waiting for him at the platform in the city. But if not, he would be going home on yet another lonesome train. His heart continued its rapid throbbing. He wanted to turn to look behind him, wondering if she was coming the other way. But he didn't want to, somehow. Pride? Fear of looking desperate. And besides, "What does it matter now?" After a few exchanges, her last message was "the lines might cross on that 9:57 train to New York." She was still such a child. Still playing games at the age of 35. He couldn't even remember her birthday; she could be 36 now. But he understood what it meant. It had come this morning. After leaving the old Hindu man and his bird, she had joked that one day their lines might have to meet. It was possible that she was playing with him, still vengeful. Make him take the train for nothing.

But he woke up from his imagination. She wouldn't do anything so elaborate for him anymore. Such scheme he didn't deserve to be part of. She was probably already married. Moved on. It's been really long. Ten years was enough to heal all wounds, however deep. But he did it. It was easy. The worst that could happen was a slight disappointment and the cost of a roundtrip ticket plus four hours of his life. Four hours compared to four years of wild and unimaginable love. He imagined she would come up behind him, touch the nape of his neck and called his name, slowly, in a more mature voice. He imagined she looked all serious now, despite the game she was putting him through. But the feel of her hand on his neck. That made him feel sad. Maybe he hadn't completely forgiven himself.

They had crossed the state line, which somehow marked a new level of sorrow in his heart. The train was quiet again, just the humming of the machines. He looked out and saw more lights. The percentage of people going to sleep later was increasing. He imagined going back alone, without even an exchange of words with her, to his own bed and sleeping alone. It wasn't that he had imagined going home with her. Loneliness, like age, was a matter of the heart; if he could only say a word or two to her, he would go home, though alone, without that pesky feeling of loneliness. Her magic still held sway in him. He wasn't sure why, but he did.

"Excuse me, Sir," said a husky voice. It was a man's voice. He was startled, and for second he was quite confused and disoriented. He looked up and saw the conductor, the same young man. His ticket puncher was in its leather holster now. He was smiling at him and said, "This is for you." He handed kevin a folded piece of paper. Before he felt the touch of the paper his heart had quickly resumed its wild stallion's pace. He nodded, forgetting to say even thank you, but his bewilderment was enough for the conductor, who felt he had done something magnanimous on an otherwise uneventful night.

When the conductor, who had taken out his ticket puncher again to swing it like a gun, had disappeared behind the advertisements, Kevin unfolded the paper like a famished child opened a package of sweets.

"You've waited long enough. Come to the car behind you. Tell me how sorry you are."

He couldn't contain a giggle. He couldn't contain his tears. He couldn't contain his aging heart. He read it again and laughed out loud.

"It's that funny?"

He looked up, and the silence of the train resumed, just for a little while longer.

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Prodigal Sun

Someone said it was like the monsoon here the past few days. Obviously, that person has never experienced a monsoon, but it was close enough. And the feeling of endless days of rain could mean little else for the mind that is desperate for some sunshine. And so when the sun finally returned to its rightful seat in the sky, there was noticeable joy in the air, even with non-humans such as trees and other plants. They seem a bit more carefree in their sways, brighten a little more. The long shadows cast by the late winter sun still gave it a slight feel of chilliness, but many joggers didn't't care, running in their shorts and T-shirts.

Walking down the streets of downtown, along side rush hour traffic, I smelled a whiff of rejuvenation. It would be another two weeks of Lent before the celebration of the resurrection of the Christian's Jesus, along with other cultures celebrating spring, we all seemed to want to get out of this rut called winter. There was one of the fiercest blizzards to slam into this region, though this particular city was spared much of the agony caused by the storms. And there seemed no end in sight for the cold spell a few months ago. When the groundhog in Pennsylvania declared more weeks of winter, there was some mood of glum, whether related to the furball's prediction or not.

On the Green there were people playing Frisbee, a young white woman with a bunch of black children. And not far from them, near the summer concert stage were another group of children around an adult, this time they were all black. The white people and children, I wasn't sure where they had gone to. The summer stage looked decrepit, as if still hibernating through the winter. Its stage was filled with water, reflecting the nearby government buildings in the waning sun. It was really warm. Even in the shade it was warm. So I sat down in the center of the Green, on one of the four benches that circumscribe the fountain in the middle. I breathe in the air that at least in my mind smelled so different from just yesterday, when the rain finally started to taper off. The marble bench was cold and uncomfortable, perhaps to dissuade the homeless from using it. I touched its surface, and it felt like the surface of glass. It's not smooth to the fingers or palm. It's cold to the touch. Its dark gray surface was shiny, reflecting the clear blue sky and my hands made golden in the sun's rays. I looked up and saw our flag fluttering slightly in the cool breeze. It was still at half-staff. I could never figure out if that was for the victims of the terrorist attack nine years ago or for the constantly increasing number of casualties in our armed forces. I looked at the flag and saw how innocent it was if all I saw was a decorated cloth hanging on a metallic pole.

I put my hands under my butt, above the cold slab of rock, palms down. My own hands were so much softer. I hunch my shoulders up a little, as if my body still recognized that it was winter, and such weather may not repeat until spring really arrived. A woman on her cell phone walked past me, talking to her children, possibly, judging from her tone and from the vocabulary of her sentences. The clicking sound of her heels on the stony floor of this center was very noticeable. I relaxed my shoulders and brought my knees up to my face so I could rest my head on them for a little bit. I watched the woman, wearing a brown trench coat and carrying a dark leather purse, walk away from me. Hopefully soon she would wear something more suitable for the spring. Though some of us were ready to start playing outside, indulge ourselves in the imagination of a spring, many of us still were wary. The sun was setting, and the cold would return tonight. It wouldn't be freezing like most nights in the last four months. But it would remind us that we had to be alert.

With this thought, I straightened my knees, my back, and took one more deep breath of this day of preview to spring. I lifted myself up and started walking again.

Accessory to Murder

It's a little chilly on this September night, especially with the drizzle. God, it's already 3 in the morning! But I am too tired to really care. I flip the collar of my jacket up to give my neck some comforting illusion that it warms it up a bit. I look around and see no cab. It's not a long walk home, really. Only 20 minutes, and if I really hurry, I can make it back in 15.

I walk down the few steps and when I reach the sidewalk I feel finally I am no longer in the dominion of the police station. It's such an ugly building. It doesn't look imposing as a center of the city's authority might look, nor does it look friendly, despite the department's motto of "To Serve Our Community". The only other time I've been inside this fortress was when my friend's car got stolen and we had to report it. That time I thought it would be like in the movies, with detectives busy running around trying to solve crimes and officers in uniforms hauling bad people in. But all I saw then was the front window of the reception where we filled out a form and left. Whatever drama was happening happened behind a door that required buzzing to be opened from the outside. This time I went in a different door. I thought I would be in one of those interrogation rooms where a good cop and a bad cop would be standing around me, one with suspenders on, balding, and the other some young, hot tempered guy in an unbuttoned suit. But I was in someone's office, with the usual stacks of paper, computers, framed certificates and honors. The only thing missing that would have made it an executive or lawyer's office were books that augment the sense of knowledge. I was brought in to repeat what happened so they could write it down, then I signed it and left. However, I did get to spend two hours outside the office, in a corridor where no drama happened, not even a janitor running to retrieve a missing broom.

The detective, or was he just some secretary, just asked me to fill out a form with all the information of my car and my driver's license. I thought the officer at the scene got all that information. I guess not. After that there was more waiting. The officer, or detective, in front of me was wearing a plain suit. I wasn't sure if he was wearing suspenders. He seemed tired too. What was he doing so late, at 2 in the morning? I wondered if he didn't have a family to go to, or perhaps he had a family to run away from. By then I was much calmer. I was no longer frantic. My heart went back up only as they led me to that drama-less corridor, and once more when the door opened and his big nose stuck out to invite me in. He offered me coffee, in that way that wasn't really sincere, just letting me know that such politeness, shallow as it might be, meant all this was routine. Then my heartbeat went back to normal. I didn't drink coffee, and he hardly acknowledged my response.

He seemed like a good guy. I can't imagine he had to raise a gun at anyone, but if he really was a detective, I guess he must have at some point, solved a lot of crimes, perhaps. His coffee was cheap; I am no coffee drinker, but I can smell a cheap one when one walks by my nostrils. In some ways I felt sorry for him. He seemed tired but refused to leave. His chaos in the room made me wonder how little else he has control over his life. But I was probably reading too much into things. I was in a sentimental mood.

Can you blame me?

That was the point. Blame. I just heard the crashing sound. My impulse was slamming the brakes. At the moment all I saw was a flash of everything, mixed together. I mostly, however, saw myself, my reaction, my body being shaken by the collision and the slamming of the brakes. But later, somehow, all the delayed images reappeared. I saw the hair. The long strands of hair, beautiful hair, hazel with blond highlights. I saw the sound. Yes, I saw the sound, not just hear it. I saw the sound of bones crushing onto metal. A metal drum. The loud sound, imagine the force on the bones, on the frail skeleton inside the flesh. Imagine the flesh being squeezed and ripped. I didn't see a face at that moment. But I remembered a face. I saw the face as I was driving down. The light was green and I drove down at probably a little bit above the speed limit, but I didn't say how much to the officers. I didn't know. It was no faster than other cars that were also speeding down towards the ramp onto the highway. I was lucky. I wasn't doing anything else wrong. I wasn't on the cell phone, I wasn't drunk, I wasn't even playing with the radio. All I did was drive down the street, just a little bit faster than legally allowed. I saw the face. From afar. She was a young woman, with long hair whose color I found out only a second or two later. She was wearing a summery skirt, talking on the cell phone, wearing a messenger bag, while waiting for the lights to change, or something. She was the only one waiting at that particular corner. I thought she was kind of cute. But I didn't much attention as I was about to change lanes to inch closer to the highway ramp.

Then the sound that pierced my heart. The sound of flesh in skeleton crashing onto my car. The feeling of an object trying to slow down my car with its small mass. No, not that sound. It was the sound of a human being screaming that preceded and ended with the sound of this human object crashing against the right headlight of my car.

I think there was a moment somewhere where I wondered if my car was all right. Selfish to the most base level, but still, I wondered.

But mostly, I wondered about the face I saw from afar. I was disoriented, completely. It was amazing that the car behind me didn't strike me from the back. Then I would be the one in the hospital with a whiplash. She's in the hospital, but I doubt she would make it. It doesn't take much to kill a person, really. And somehow, for her sake, I hope she doesn't make it, because otherwise, it would be some dreadful paralysis that you find out about in some tearjerker movie.

Life is full of ironies. The images slowly reappear in the hours the passed. It had been many hours, really. That was around 6PM. How did the time pass so fast? But during all this time, shock, as if it were a thick lymph fluid, slowly seeped out, and in the space it leaves behind, images flowed in. With the background of the dreadful scream, the sound of crushing bones, and honking from the surrounding, and the squealing of the tires on the harsh pavement, I saw not only the beautiful hair, but the gushing of blood. When did I see it. After the first moment, of course. There wasn't much at first. But I stood up, looked out, and saw some blood on the right tip of the hood. I went out to find a growing number of spectators, all shocked, of course, but none as shocked as me. Then I saw a pool of blood emerging before I saw the source.

But that's not the irony. This is all very normal from an accident. Except that it wasn't an accident. Images came back like a logical chain of events. Before I saw any blood I saw a man in a white coat. A researcher or a doctor. I wasn't sure. I saw a man in a white coat running. The first image was him running away, frantically, with the emerging spectators looking at him in added disbelief. Then that image took in an earlier image. I saw the cute girl talking on the phone. I saw, or imagined, what a wonderful yet complex life she must be preparing for as a medical student. I assumed she was since we were at the medical area. That's part of the irony. The hospital is only across the street, in particular, the emergency room ramp. But the true irony was that I saw her talking on the phone, and before I blinked my eyes, now that the images were flowing back in the space left behind by shock, I saw a man, no doubt the same man, in white coat, a doctor, I'd like to believe, pushing her. And when my eyes were done blinking its fraction of second blink, I heard the scream, the thud. He ran in the direction of traffic, though on the sidewalk. Where did he want to go. I didn't see a face, but that didn't bother the detective in front of me, since other witnesses were there to help him figure out the murderer.

What's the motive? I imagine a disgruntled doctor in love with a medical student who refused to reciprocate and therefore trampled his ego, a surgeon, probably.

But my imagination was overwhelmed with the reality that was returning in fragments of images. The eyes, all the eyes I saw as I walked out of the car, they were rapidly moving from me, the car, the pool of blood, and other eyes. I felt my body sore, as if I got hit even though my body didn't get hit. It was just so tense, the whole body just constricted, squeezed by the brakes that applied to the tires. My heart was racing like I could not remember this speed. I saw the hair again, splayed out near my tire. I could not walk closer to see what I'd done. The blood was enough to tell me a lot. I wondered if she was still breathing. Maybe breathing her last breath, wondering what happened. I wondered what the person on the other side of the phone must be going through now, or maybe the phone dropped and disconnected the call. I wasn't thinking about all these things then. These came while I was waiting and recovering.

They were looking at me, not hatefully, but undoubtedly very shocked. I wondered what I looked like. Face lost all blood, perhaps. All pallid. I just stood there. Unaware of the traffic jam that was building around me. Unaware of the growing number of eyes surrounding us. I simply froze. I thought a lot and felt a lot for myself; I stopped thinking about the dark blood on the black asphalt over there. I don't know how long I had stood there before the police came, whose presence I didn't notice until an officer tapped me firmly and started asking me questions. I was surprisingly very clear minded suddenly, very clear in my report. I was sure the witnesses corroborated my story. I was sure no one even mentioned that everyone sped here. But I didn't think about these things. I suddenly felt I was outside my body and managed to take the images that had accumulated up to that point and regurgitated to the officer.

Then there was the wait. Long hours of waiting.

Now I am alone, walking home. A free man. I was free of suspicion and guilt from the beginning. But only by the standards of logic and the law. Tears started flowing down, mixing with the mist of the ungodly hour. The mind is too tired to object. The heart now is bursting at its seams with images, duplicating themselves in strength, and released into my blood vessels in the form of tears. I had helped someone do something evil. I had helped someone extinguish a dream, a life, and cause unimaginable pain to many others. My body is still sore, especially my shoulders, neck, and back. The street is dreadfully dark here. I have to cross it at some point. I cross at the darkest point, from one unlit sidewalk to the other. Perhaps some equally unaware driver of fate would cut my life short here.

Short and Sweet

We dance until it was way past the time. Midnight. We dance.

There's the girl with the curly hair. She's pretty. I don't know in what way. Her face is symmetrical. Her eyebrows dark and thin. Her nose is almost regal. She's a beginner, so "experts" like us get her full attention.

There's the best dancer in town, in the state. She's my best friend in tango. She is much sought after. But she doesn't tire out easily. Her heart is too full of energy. She could be sick and you'd find her dancing. She loves the music too much.

Then the music. Responsible person is the DJ, one of our friends. To be a DJ you really have to love the music, love it deeply, know it like a wife, love it like a lover. And you have to know how the music affects the crowd so you can use the crowd to determine the music. He has been listening to this music longer than I have. If the music were a person, he would marry her.

I am sitting on a bar stool, alone. I don't want to chitchat with anyone now. I just want to watch. I was sitting here earlier and when I looked at the row of people sitting, someone I knew winked at me. Not realy "wink"; in Argentina it is called the "cabaceo", when you gesture with a slight bend of the head to suggest a dance. I saw it and I was a little reluctant because what I really wanted to do was sit and watch. Now I am sitting again, I am not looking at anyone in that row.

The time has sprung forward an hour, and I have to catch up!

Soured Celebration

She is a good wife. She has made the best cake for her husband within the limits of time and her own baking experience. Her husband treats her well, is a wonderful man in the the most obvious sense of the word. He is fond of her, pays her attention, and his touches are gentle and sincere. The love in those touches aren't ebullient but they are real, they are never forced, for he loves her in the easiest way one can understand love. Their son is a timid little boy, who can't imagine being separated from his mother for more than two minutes, more than a minute. Even if he isn't in the same room with her, he at least needs to know that she is somewhere nearby. He desperately wants to please her.

She wants to please them both, but not desperately, and not reluctantly either. It is merely a duty of a wife and a mother to please and love the others in her family.

Today is her husband's birthday. She had made one cake and it was imperfect. Its letters were crooked, and one of the icing flowers seemed unreal. She dumped it all into the garbage and started over. Her husband deserves the best, not only because he loves her, but because a good person deserves nothing less than the perfect birthday cake. It's true that even if the cake is a total fiasco, he would still love it, and love her. Criticism and overt complaints have never been part of the vocabulary between these two.

His enthusiasm for this cake of closer to perfection is not any greater than what it would have been for the one now in the garbage. She knew this when she dumped that symbol of her failure as a wife into the garbage. But she persisted in making a new one, less, now she realizes, for his sake, for his love, than for her own selfish desire for redemption, redemption for something, but really nothing concrete. She has been a good wife. Giving him a son and doing all the chores of the family. Her only vice had been reading, but that never bothered him; it is only a vice because it takes her away from these two men of her life, takes her mind, and sometimes heart, to places they are forbidden to enter. Sometimes when she reads she notices the small creature standing with his toy train at the threshold of the kitchen door. Her heart sinks under the weight of her guilt when she chooses to ignore this constant shadow of hers, knowing well that he wants to be part of this world of fantasies. She doesn't read cheap romance novels that take her to shallow fantasies substituting real illicit affairs, but rather classics, classics that made her think about other people, their lives, their sorrows, their challenges, all to, perhaps, I don't know for sure, all to fill the void she feels nearly every second of her waking life.

That void is ever so enlarged when she wants to be a good wife and wants to make the best cake. The second cake is really just a selfish way to fill that enlarged void. Now her beloved and loving husband, with his usual sincere and beautiful smile, so timeless, leans over the burning candles, closes his eyes, and blows them off with all his might. In that process, a few but visible droplets sprayed all over the surface of the perfect cake.

The boy is happy. He's always happy when the two adults in the house are happy, which appears to be quite often. He claps his hands in joy. This only exacerbated the sudden anger in his mother. She saw the droplets. She now can't believe that all her effort is suddenly undone, the product of her hard work, tainted. It really doesn't matter how good a job she has done; the result is always perfect affections. Suddenly, that void of hers is left intact, if not enlarged.

The smile on her husband's face fades when he sees his wife in such strange state. She is expressionless, looking at the cake that used to be on fire but now seems cold and dead. He is worried. And he becomes even more worried when he asks what the matter was and she doesn't answer. He touches her hand and is a little startled at the coldness of the fingers. His heart races, and that somehow makes his son's heart race as well.

Without looking at either one of them, keeping her eyes on the extinguished cake, she says, "I am going out for a minute." She then turns around and walks to the door. She almost isn't conscious of her own action, as if she were sleepwalking. She opens the door after taking the car keys, closes it behind her, not hearing whatever her husband is saying, or the unending, desperate questioning of her son, and walks to their SUV.

Inside the car, she sits quietly, staring into the distance where all the other middle-upper class family houses are standing in which other people are cooped up together being nice in their own ways. She stares and thinks about what she was reading this morning.

The Yellow Room

There was a window in the room. She was almost positive. But she made it go away, at least that was what she wanted to believe. She willed its disappearance. And the only source of light in the room is the incandescent light above, which she also willed to transfer from the much gentler white light so typical of offices, especially where serious business such as the present is conducted. She preferred yellow light, which made the room so much smaller, cozier, and of course, yellower. The mahogany desk that divided her from the serious man in the suit and glasses felt almost like the trunk of a big cannon, that she would have to exert inordinate force to turn it so the turret would point to the enemy. Who was the enemy? Not just the pawn in front of her, looking particularly stressed, each minute more so, while perusing endlessly her documents. Perhaps she could turn the cannon to her past. To her circumstances. To her environment. Or to herself.

She remembered reading about the Mutiny in India during the latter days of the British Empire. The Brits rounded up the rebels, tired them to the end of the cannon and made their comrades, who were next to take their place, light the cannon and see red screen that would inevitably form after the explosion.

How easy a death would that be. Brutal as it may seem, and histrionic too, as its purpose was, it was probably more humane than any death people have to go through these days in the hands of the authority. She was no authority. She has come to be told how bad her finances were, exacerbated by the disappearance of her husband with whatever liquidity they had shared. The four-eye creature ensconced before her, on the other side of the cold cannon body, never really stopped shaking his head and muttering the mantras of bad news. If only he could just disappear into a red smoke in equally painless ways. But it would be of no use; he was simply the messenger she had paid to deliver her news from the depths of hell.

Hell was here. It was yellow. It was not hot, well conditioned, the air. She could hear the humming of the air from above, but that wasn't the the vent of the air conditioning system, but the sorrows from other busy bodies in this hell murmuring about their own plights. A butterfly, actually two, but she was sure, came fluttering down and landed on her lap. It was really just one butterfly, but the wings seemed complex, the shadows it cast, the tricks they played on her eyes, made her think there were two butterflies. There were too many tricks. Her heart started racing, and she quickly grabbed the butterfly with her right palm and squeezed this entity. She was shocked to feel pain, as if she were squeezing the thorns of a rose, but before she could reopen her hand to see what was happening, she heard an abrupt sound.

The window returned. The room was white washed again. The AC was humming and gently releasing air into the office of not some imp but her accountant, who had just shut the books in a big sound, not to wake her from her stupor, but to reassert his authority as a messenger of hell. It was as if they had taken the elevator back to earth and that was why everything seemed normal and familiar again.

"It's unfortunate that this is happening at this time of the economic crisis, Dr. Lynch."

She could not, for some reason, really see his eyes. He was looking straight at her, without the slightest embarrassment of being the one to unleash all that bad news.

"The ongoing investigation into the clinic you and your husband ran...."

He must have done this before, though she couldn't imagine he would have more than one or two clients in her state. He probably had another job, moonlighting as an actor, or worse, a hitman. The kind that could point a gun to a little girl and pull the trigger without a flinch, could keep looking at the victim from the moment the intention to raise the gun to the moment she fell on the ground, blood squirting in the air, and even later, watching the the last breath fade away.

She noticed that his necktie was a little loose. He had been fretting too. He wasn't made of stone but he wanted to appear so. He wouldn't get in trouble, but he was somehow affected by the enormity of the problem before him, perhaps even excited. He might make it to the news. His face might appear in a two-second clip of the court scene, even better if it was drawn by some artist that conflates the emotions of the individuals sitting on the stand. To be able to shine amidst infamy but not be part of the consequences.

As his lips moved and clear words were enunciated out between his coffee-stained teeth, Dr. Lynch saw that the floor started shaking. They were on the 32nd floor of one of the tallest buildings in Midtown Manhanttan. She was surrounded by glass buildings, as viewed from that one huge window, and some of the buildings were reflecting the waning sun. There was a giant pot hosting an even more gigantic palm tree in the corner left of the demon whose lips were moving and whose messages were coming out of between his teeth. She could see the words, spelled out in Courier font, in a two-dimensional belt weaved from inside his throat and spewing out like smoke out of a chimney that dissipates before it gets anywhere, so she could see the words but didn't really hear them. To his right was a fountain, some sort of oriental fountain, big, bigger than the one they had confiscated from her house. The running water sound it was making had somehow gradually become louder and louder, especially as the floor started shaking. And as the smoke of the words that were woven from the four-eye creature in front of her thickened the air, the window once again disappeared, eaten away by the yellow wall. The sound of the oriental waterfall became white noise by now, almost as if the strange dragon-looking creature at the bottom of the waterfall was hissing steam out very loudly. The palm tree had grown rapidly, its leaves spanning the entire ceiling but yellowing at the same time, nearly camouflaged. Under this jaundice canopy, the creature continued to talk about how the numbers were crunched and the results he had found, and the government inevitably would too.

By the time he started talking about recommendations, the floor had stopped shaking. She noticed that the chair she was sitting on was very comfortable. Some poor member of an unidentifiable species had died so she could sit on its leather. But she felt no remorse. The creature was standing beside her, skinless, of course, but standing in an apologetic manner. She looked at it, and it was a big creature, size of a cow, clownish as it stood like a human, as if a cow character from "Far Side". But she wasn't sure if it was a cow. It was too bloodied, too disfigured. It was this unpleasant comportment that made her think it was the creature that was remorseful, not her. The chair was comfortable, good for her back. She was in a cool state. She wasn't sweating, though the AC in hell was functioning perfectly. She even leaned back a little, forcing the skinless creature to move back a pace to give room.

"Just two flights down is the best attorney we can recommend for this. Though I have to figure out how you can pay for him...."

She stopped thinking recently. All her life she had to think. She had to think about grades, about school, about what that cute boy wanted, decipher how he really felt, then the same process for the man she actually got, then lost, then another one, and then the even more exhausting than medical school and residence was trying to cater to all these men, men in power, men with access, men in her life, then the latest man, called her husband. It felt like all her life she was thinking about how to do what these people wanted.

That cannon was in front of her again. One wasn't, however, enough to process through all these people, all these men, and some women.

But she somehow stopped thinking, a few weeks ago, after a lot of crying and screaming and medication. That night she looked out one of the windows looking out Madison Avenue, only three blocks from the hospital where she started working after her residency. She looked out into a small park from the height of ten stories. It was dark, so she could only imagine what was there.

Not really much imagination since she had walked past and sometimes into the park. At that time of the year the trees were still carrying some leaves, also ready to dive into the ground soon to be frozen by another harsh winter. She could imagine one leaf dangling, inevitably would fall but still, somehow, in the mind of a human being who anthropomorphizes everything, clang to life for just a few more seconds even though what it really wanted was to jump head first to whence it had come. She imagined that leaf.

But memory took her somewhere farther, to a distant place and time. It was cold. She was a small child, about 5 years old. Her father, another Dr. Lynch, was sitting next to her small body, frail. He didn't care about her age or her sex, just her brain. He had placed an arithmetic workbook in front of her. His beard wasn't graying yet, she remembered, but it was prickling her soft cheeks as he looked over her shoulders to see how she was doing. She couldn't do something. Was it a division? She couldn't have been so stupid at the age of 5 to not do addition and subtraction. Multiplication should have been a cinch. But her expectations of herself had always been behind her father's, at least far enough behind that she always felt alone in his presence. He was bristling with increasing anger and frustration. She could feel his breath, but what really irritated her was his prickly beard.

Could his beard have been the reason she would never date, let alone, marry a Jew, at least not an orthodox Jew? She wasn't thinking about that a few weeks ago. Watching the imagined leaf hanging on the branch far from the ground, wanting at once clinging to safety and diving into death, she remembered the sound, louder than the one made by the creature before her when he closed the books. It was the sound of the man in the beard slamming his palm on the table, perhaps a mahogany table, on which the workbook rested. She had frowned and scratched her cheek that was being irritated by his beard, and his first reaction to this little girl's unruly behavior was bringing his big, calloused hand onto the table. The thunderous noise jolted her, and before her tears could come out, she felt her body wrung to the side so that her still dry eyes could face the wrath of God. Before her was this familiar face in the mask of ire. Or maybe the familiar face had always been the mask and the ire the real person. Her tears were postponed.

"Get out! Get out there and maybe the cold can sober you up and wipe away that insolence of yours."

Did he really say "insolence"? A five-year old girl, however smart (though not as smart as her Dad had ever wanted), could not have learned that word. How much of this memory was real?

But she was outside, in the cold, much like this late autumn night when she had her right leg dangling out the window, ten stories above that playground. Maybe it was the medication that was putting the word "insolence" in her memory. But she was outside. It was cold. She wasn't allowed a jacket. Her father didn't believe that cold could make you sick, but it could bring back some work ethics in insolent sloths. She was cold. She was shivering. Her tears still hadn't arrived. They were, unbeknownst to her then, was taking the bedtime train. She felt the dark garden where she would spend her twenty-minute exile was all blue, dark blue. (She knew it was twenty minutes because her father made her write down the time before she had left and then upon return a subtraction exercise was done.) Like the park she was looking down as an adult a few weeks ago, her family garden was familiar. She knew where everything was. But that night, the first time in her life, she chose to pretend something else. She saw a lanky farmer where the cypress tree grew from a seed taken from Jerusalem usually was. The farmer looked at her with his bluish face and smiled. She smiled back. He went back to hoeing the garden. There were fireflies, dancing with their yellow lanterns in this blue darkness. She looked up and saw her breath rising up to the full, yellow moon that cast the blue light onto them. The breath kept rising and embraced the yellow disk.

She heard a noise and turned to look in its direction. Two cats, one was theirs, the other was a strayed one, were sitting in a far corner. They were talking, smoking hookah at the same time. They looked like the characters in the illustrated versions of the Torah her aunt had given her, with much quiet disapproval from her father. The cats called out to her, asking her to join them. She shook her head and told them that it was her punishment to stand in the middle of the garden and let the cold help her regain her desire to work. The cats shrugged and resumed their discussion. When the sky and the earth both became so blue and dark, there was, in her heart, no more difference. She could caress the moon the way she caressed that cat that was getting very loud with the other one. She could pick the stars off the heavens.

But she was a good girl. She would spend the rest of her life thinking because, as her father had told her since she could start understanding English, that thinking was the only way to salvation for her people.

When she remembered that night, those twenty minutes, feeling her goosebumps and shaking mad while letting her imagination go wild, she gave out a sigh. She dragged her right leg back into the warm apartment. She stood to close the window, looking down once more at the pavement ten stories down, imagining her body falling, watching her body falling, hearing the cracking of her bones, her skull, on the insensitive pavement of this senseless city, and then she closed the window, closing herself in from the outside world. After that she simply cried herself to sleep and she stopped thinking.

She had come here, in this yellow room, only because the man in front of her called her later and established an appointment. Here she sat at the appointed time, has been sitting since the appointed time. She felt a hand, or something, touching her right shoulder as she watched those lips continued moving a little more and the smoke of words make its final run. The skinless creature showed its sympathies for her with this touch. And tears in her eyes came out again, only the first time since that night when she was reminded of those twenty minutes three decades ago. The tears distorted everything and a different room started to form around her.