EDGE on the Net

The highways are how I know life works. Driving on them, any of them, cars zoom pass, cut in front, hit loops and under-passes and exits, and chase along bridges. Inside, drivers are texting and phoning, planning and fighting, furious, worried about the day forward or the past unchangeable. They swarm around you like hornets, yet you make it, alive, and find home. Accidents happen; gory ones, blood and stretchers and flabby white thighs, and you stare and pray behind glass that it wasn’t you, and go on. There’s a rhythm to it, the highways, insanity pushed out of sealed-up windows.

Allan no longer drives on that highway. He used to. My wonderful friend of ten years took one of those roads every weekend from Manhattan to East Hampton, the reward of a lifetime’s worth of the five-day job. The tie went off, number-crunching forgotten, and tennis balls bought for his Long Island home, safe and colorful, where sanity welcomes. Sunday brought him back to city life, braced for another five-day week that ends at retirement. You do what you have to to reach the point.

It changed undetected, like a tumor. Mirrors showed age and hills. Nothing happened made a dent, friends aren’t a home, lovers aren’t. Youth lied, so did Mom. She died in your guilt, and doesn’t talk to your pictures. Allan took it, nine to nine hours, less food and frail fingernails, dust of New York and September ashes. No one noticed that sleep was your only friend, the frozen taffy snapping. Ambulances and intervention and pills given more and more and showing no one’s happy stares. Screams in a waiting room, lying finally, and now the world is this place. You’re locked and I see a line.

You were my heart, hands, in ache, and my blood took over. Doctors and social workers and friends and business and mail and bills and the coordinating and incompetence and a freezing room and sweaters and food. It’s my privilege. You don’t think about these things you just do them. Mothers know that. Husbands and wives know that. Work goes on and someone knows me at a rooftop dance. I go into a VIP room and a young woman shaves the face that until now belonged to you. Chords and plastic aren’t allowed. Me, there’s a book and people look up.

Pollution creeps in. Lawyers and polished faces push him pens, anger and finger-pointing with cluster-fuck friends. They chirp. Everyone’s helping but is it only for them. Is credit the point? Am I the point? They and their bags and un-allowed cell phones push you out. You knew him best, but they’re what’s best. The right circles make decisions. You saw him once through shiny yellow paints, and they couldn’t find it. They’ll return to help just as soon as they get back.

Bubble-tight windows with meetings, and then a faded woman engulfed by her chair. She’s related, somehow. Her living room anger blames me verbally, as even the air must know. Allan couldn’t have fallen, good men don’t. Allan is responsible, normal, unlike that one. He and those are because of this.

And there was another summer and a father who fell off the highway, split open, and a room with relatives creeping. And it wasn’t for us because she was to blame, the wife. Their voices are higher up and around the ceiling. They know about stocks and schools and try to take us away, now their children. Mothers are knocked and go on, and exist sometimes for us. This is what women do.

And there was a different year, when you took me to Paris. You gave me paradise and streets and an adult life, and maybe sometimes I was in the stars and not in you. Perhaps I started this.

Three weeks and it’s still here, and me too. And sometimes I forget and that’s worse. He never answers, talks, but somewhere behind the brown and black grows old laughter and never how did I become this but what can I become. There are the same questions, but I go out and see a movie and my friend talks of boyfriend troubles; she always talks of boyfriend troubles. I can’t help her I tell her, and she’s off in the dark because I didn’t listen. I’ve forgotten about Friday nights and buzz.

There are bicycles on the sidewalks and one of them almost crushed my dog. The charm bracelet of my heart lives on a thread and I’m afraid to walk him. The guy looks back, scared for himself. Taffy’s sticking to my shoe, and babies are in doubles, in parks. Someone wants to smash them too, but their parents look above my fear. They keep pushing them out in the world to turn it around. I think of the shit on my mattress when that guy wasn’t clean, and I can’t read what people do. Sharon Tate’s on TV and I know it’s worse. My fingertips hurt on the keyboard to remind me of panic and withdrawal and what it’s like to look at someone and have them not be real. I have a fantasy where I’m in a rocking chair and it’s white and there’s a clock on the wall and I can’t convince a nurse that it’s a hoax; my head sometimes does this, I’m not insane.

Your hospital is walking distance, and the road’s static, the only thing level are streets, and I’m afraid of being so distracted I’ll walk in front of traffic, those swarms, but I don’t want to turn the music in my ears off even though it’s unsafe and it was supposed to be a soundtrack instead of an alarm. It’s hot, flat heat, and there was a time that I knew I’d be in another part of the city, where brownstones and cobblestones receded to sunsets that drooped. Now I stare against window panes I can’t afford to own. My feet freeze on the cement near the entrance. Somewhere men are partying on beaches. If I could only be back in their drinks then even I could start over.

And this was supposed to be fun.

The nurse unlocks the door and lets me in. It’s easier now that she recognizes me. They search my bag, and I go into this place that never existed until it became yours. There’s a scene in "Terms of Endearment" where Shirley MacLaine drags herself back to the all-too-familiar hospital. I almost laugh at the similarities and the melodrama. No one is hovered over him, no chatter pulling things off him, and I can sit down and hold his hand and hope for a word. Visiting hours end so I get up to leave.

"Wait."

This is a better day. Allan wants to talk.

"How are you?"

"Great."

I lied, of course, but for now it’s his turn.