Dept. Of Speculation

4

I gave you my favorite thing from Chinatown, pressed it drunkenly into your hand. We were in my kitchen that first night. BEAUTIFUL GAUZE MASK, the package said.

The next morning, I went over to the philosopher’s apartment. “Oh no, what have you done?” I said. He made me breakfast and told me about his date. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” she’d asked him. “How about ten? How about fifteen?” By the time he walked her home, they were thirty years in. I told him it sounded like a duck and a bear going on a date. The philosopher considered this. “More like a duck and a martini,” he said.

You called me. I called you. Come over, come over, we said.

I learned you were fearless about the weather. You wanted to walk around the city, come rain come snow come sleet, recording things. I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.

I listened to you on the radio at midnight. Once you played a recording of atoms smashing. Another time wind across leaves. Field recordings, you called them. It was freezing in my apartment and I used to listen to your show in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin. I wore a hat and gloves and heavy wool socks made for men. One night you played a track you’d made for me. An ice cream truck overlaid with the sound of gulls at Coney Island and the Wonder Wheel spinning.

It is stupid to have a telescope in the city, but we bought one anyway.

That year I didn’t travel alone. I’ll meet you there, you said. But it was late when we spotted each other at the train station. You had a ten-dollar haircut. I was fatter than when I’d left. It seemed possible that we’d traveled across the world in error. We tried to reserve judgment.

We did not understand where we were going when we took the boat over to Capri. It was early April. A light cold rain misted over the sea. We took a funicular up from the dock and found ourselves the only tourists. You are early, the conductor said with a shrug. The streets smelled like lavender and for a long time neither of us noticed that there weren’t any cars. We stayed at a cheap hotel that had a view out the window more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen. The water was wickedly blue. A cliff of dark rock jutted out of the sea. I wanted to cry because I was sure I would never get to be in such a place again. Let’s explore, you said, which is what you always said when I started to look that way. We walked for a ways along the edge of the cliff until we came to a bus stop. There we waited, holding hands, not talking. I was thinking about what it would be like to live somewhere so beautiful. Would it fix my brain? The bus pulled up. Three people were employed to run it: one to sell tickets, one to take them, one to drive. This made us happy. We took it to the far side of the island, where the people looked more curiously at us. In a store, I saw gum labeled BROOKLYN and you bought it for me.