The Emerald Light in the Air

POND, WITH MUD

“The yellow bird made from cloth and / vines sits better in the / window than / the red truck I built last / year of / bottles,” Patrick Rouse wrote, in the fifteenth volume of what he liked to refer to as his life’s work — in reality, a journal crammed with passages written in a metaphorized terminology that Patrick had borrowed, or so he told himself, from the Imagist poets, and which he used to describe his emotions and whatever objects aroused his emotions. The “yellow bird,” for instance, referred to a lingerie bikini set featuring yellow lace woven in a tropical-jungle motif, which he had purchased a few days earlier for his fiancée, Caroline, who, at that moment, was standing in the living room modeling it for Patrick and — though the boy could hardly appreciate the significance of his mother’s erotic poses in bare feet before the hearth … or could he? — for her son, the “three-eyed rabbit.” That being, of course, more of Patrick’s code, or poetry, in this case describing Gregory, Caroline’s five-year-old from her marriage to Roger, an unemployed chamber musician.

“You like it?” Caroline asked Patrick.

He did. He did like it! He said, “That’s a good color for you.”

Caroline turned and peered over her shoulder, as if into a mirror hung on the wall. There was no mirror. She drank from her wine, and said, “It is a good color, isn’t it? I wouldn’t have picked it, because it’s bright. But you spotted it! You had the wisdom to see it.” She took another sip.

“Not wisdom,” Patrick said, as he wrote, in scratchy blue letters on a blank page in the book open on his lap, “Fat airplanes spot cloudless skies / their propellers / soft fans humming / leaking,” which was effectively a reminder to himself that soon he would be taking off his clothes, getting into bed, pushing aside the blue coverlet, climbing atop Caroline, and fucking.

“You always know what colors I can wear.”

“All I need to figure that out is a peek in the closet.”

At that point Gregory, who was sitting in the enormous Mission-style chair beneath the framed photograph of Caroline on vacation, waving from the bow of the USS Wisconsin—Gregory made one of his demands.

“Other! Chair!”

“Do you want to get him?” Patrick said.

“You get him. I’ve got these new things on.”

What was difficult was not moving the boy from one chair to another, exactly; the problem consisted in the likelihood that, once moved, Gregory might become sad. It was grotesque, Patrick thought, always to be hoisting this growing boy, who could, after all, walk. Why did they do it, he and Caroline? Why did they take orders from Gregory? There was nothing wrong with him — at least, nothing Dr. Percy could ever find.

“Here I come, my young boy who is not my own,” Patrick said. It was one of his jokes. He closed the volume on his lap and capped his pen, an ostentatious black-and-red lacquered fountain pen that he had bought for himself as a gift, and which leaked while he wrote. As always, he checked his hands, his shirt, and the front of his pants around the zipper. He found no ink smears. It had been a good writing day.

It frequently happened, when Patrick stopped purposefully making notes in “Pond, with Mud” (his secret name for his encrypted journal), that he began to feel as if he might be on the verge of formulating a concrete idea about the nature of existence, and about his place in the scheme of things. It was a feeling that came, as he thought of it, from deep in his heart. But each time he got this feeling it almost instantly went away. Would he never know what it was that he was trying to think about himself?

He forced himself to concentrate on Gregory. The boy was spread, neither sitting nor lying — Gregory was doing a perverse version of both at once — across the leather seat cushion of the big Stickley that Patrick had carted with him everywhere he’d lived since college. The chair was coming apart in places. Something structural somewhere had broken, and one leg had a tendency to work its way gradually loose from the frame. Every now and then, the leg had to be slapped back into position. Patrick had seduced Amy in this chair. Then Vanessa. Then Caroline.

He said to the sprawling boy, “Funny Bunny, I’m going to do something for you that you are going to like.”

“Don’t get him excited,” Caroline said. She placed her wineglass on the mantel. She did a slow, balletic turn, showing Patrick her body. And Patrick knew — her voice had that angry sound — that the wine had begun to take hold.

He approached the boy. He leaned over and placed his hands under Gregory’s arms. He began to lift. He said, “Do you love it when I hold you in the air? Are you my Bunny?”

In fact, the approval Patrick cared for was Caroline’s. Patrick craved recognition from her, in order to view himself favorably as a man who could function as a father. This had become especially meaningful to him after what had happened a few days before.

He had taken the afternoon off from his job at the printing press and gone with the boy in tow to catch the two o’clock train to the zoo that had recently opened on the outskirts of town, on marshlands that had been home to a chemical-solvent extraction plant that had burned to the ground. Immediately following the zoo’s inaugural ribbon-cutting ceremony — or relatively soon after, to be more precise — strange things had begun to happen to the more esoteric wild animals. Why was it that the rare and endangered species, the ones you’d never heard of, all seemed to have compromised immune systems? At any rate, it had been reported in the papers that the board of governors and the director of the zoo were soon to come under indictment for cruelty to animals and for various misappropriations of municipal funds. The zoo’s future was in question. The time for a visit was now.

“Here we go!” Patrick had exclaimed to Gregory as, with the boy’s damp hand grasped in his fist, the two of them made their way awkwardly through one of the angling, cavernous passageways leading from the street to the elevated central lobby of the city’s restored art deco train terminal. Patrick was in the habit of carrying along, wherever he went, the current volume of “Pond, with Mud.” Here, with a view ahead toward the train station’s towering and heavily leaded windows, windows that allowed ray after ray of sunlight to spill into the station’s airy middle spaces, illuminating floating dust and giving the whole marble place the steamy, mystical aura of a site associated with feelings and moods that were, for want of a better word, spiritual (the spirit of progress? This, to Patrick, had the feel of a theme), even otherworldly — here in the train station, Patrick felt inspired to say to the boy, whose hand he now shook loose, “Hang on a minute, Bunny.”

He took his pen from the inside pocket of his coat. He unscrewed the brass-and-lacquer cap. What he loved most about untwisting the cap was the care required to keep the ink from running. Rituals were important. For instance, Patrick always carried the journal tucked at a certain angle beneath his left arm, pressed close to his heart, in the manner, he fantasized, of some boyish scholar traipsing with a rare edition of Donne through an English library hung with tapestries. Now he opened the volume and found a clean page. He gazed up at the tile mosaics of women’s faces adorning the lintels above the station windows. As he wrote, Patrick whispered to himself, in cadence with the travelers’ footsteps echoing along the entryway to the great hall, “Beasts or angels / arcing / entwined.”

“We! Go!” Gregory shouted, badly interrupting Patrick, who looked rapidly left to right, and up and down, saying, “What? What? Of course, Gregory. We’re going to the zoo to see the deformed animals.”

Patrick had one of his upsetting everyday thoughts: Christ, I’m not much of a poet, am I? He pushed this question out of his mind.

In a soft voice, and in tones meant to be conciliatory, he said to Gregory, “Hey, little man, you don’t have to scream.”

It was too late. The boy was crying. Patrick shut the book. He had forgotten to blow the ink dry, and the page would smudge. It would be a bad writing day.

“Shit,” he said to Caroline’s son, bawling in the middle of the crowded station concourse. Carefully Patrick capped and returned the pen to the interior pocket of his jacket. He produced a wad of the loose tissues he always carried in his coat pockets for these routine weeping sessions. He knelt and pushed the soft white paper toward the boy’s face. What had made him think that he could ever deal with a kid?

In fact, he was dealing with a kid, and not doing nearly as bad a job as he worried others might suppose, were any of those people rushing by — on their way to trains or jobs — to stop and watch as he wiped the tears and the snot from Gregory’s cheeks and the rashy area around his mouth.

“There, it’s all right. Come on. Don’t you want to see the goiters on the chimpanzees?”

“The! What?”

“Where in the world did you learn to talk, anyway?” Patrick asked. This question came out sweetly. He said, “We’re a pair, aren’t we?” and finished wiping the boy’s face. Gregory had such clear eyes. They were not at all bloodshot, even after sobbing.

Patrick put the wet tissues back in a coat pocket to dry for the next squall. From another pocket he fished a child-size bottle of juice and a miniature straw. He shook the bottle, opened it, planted the straw in the juice, and held bottle and straw for Gregory to drink. The bottle was quite small; Patrick’s hand closed around it. Were you to have seen the two of them, the man kneeling before the boy, the boy sucking on the almost invisible plastic straw, you might have imagined that the boy was drinking from the man’s hand.

“Ready?” Patrick asked.

“Juice!” Gregory exclaimed, and, just like that, he was done drinking, and everything returned to normal.

Patrick removed the wet straw from the juice. He capped the bottle and put it back in his pocket for later. No trash can was in sight, so he replaced the straw in the jacket pocket already stuffed with the bottle and the used tissues. Looking over the top of Gregory’s head, he saw, across the terminal crowded with people indistinctly coming and going, a young man and woman holding hands and running, though not in the manner of people hurrying to board a train. The girl seemed to be skipping, or dancing. Her skirt flew up around her legs. Was there music playing in her head? Was she maybe wearing headphones?

Patrick took Gregory’s hand in his. He said, with equal measures of sarcasm and earnestness, “Shall we dance?”

It was at this moment that a musician who had set up near the door to the street — the door through which Patrick and Gregory had entered the station — began playing a violin. The musician was situated directly behind Patrick, who, for one narcissistic moment, believed that the music in the tunnel was a reverberant production of his own imagination. Then, peering down at Gregory, he saw that Gregory was peeking around his, Patrick’s, legs. Gregory was seeing the man playing the violin. Patrick turned and saw that the violinist was Roger, Gregory’s father, the man Caroline had been married to when Patrick had come on the scene.

“Roger! Hey, Roger!” Patrick called down the corridor. It was an act of impulsiveness and guilt. Patrick heard his own voice echoing, decaying, and dying against the richer, seductive sounds of the music. The musician — yes, it was Caroline’s former husband — was wearing a green coat that looked frayed and unclean. God only knew what he might have been carrying in the pockets of that coat. It appeared that Roger had continued to be what he had been in the old days: a poor, alcoholic artist.

“Look, Bunny,” Patrick said to the top of Gregory’s head. “Do you know who that man is?”

“Daddy.”

“Right you are. Daddy. The pea-green boat with torn sails. Someone should haul her out to sea.”

What was he saying? What was he doing? Why had he called out? Had the violinist heard? Had Roger seen Gregory spying from behind Patrick’s legs? Patrick flipped open “Pond, with Mud,” got out his pen, went through the ritual of delicately removing the cap, and scribbled (after searching for an unsmudged page) a few lighthearted, comical-nautical associations. “Pea-green / boat / towed / in shreds / out.” This time he remembered to blow on the ink.

And it was still possible, he thought, that Roger had neither seen nor heard them, that he and the boy might slip away and take refuge on a train-platform bench, before setting out on their journey to the contaminated zoo. He had taken the afternoon off for this. They really ought to make it to the zoo.

He watched the violinist, who was swaying above the hips in that enchantedly theatrical fashion in which string players expectably do — as if blowing in the intermittent wind on which all music travels. And travelers, actual ones, entering and departing through the colossal wooden doors onto the street, altered their courses, automatically tacking around Roger and his empty music case left open on the ground for small bills and change. Patrick watched the bow rising and falling, pulled by the violinist’s hand across the instrument’s strings. He had the impression that the musician was rocking himself to sleep. The music rolled up the tunnel. Because the corridor walls and the ceiling were tiled, the notes came on amplified, and certain passages sounded both muddled and complexly dynamic, orchestral.

It was Brahms. No, it wasn’t. It was Sibelius. No, it was Robert Schumann. It was not Mendelssohn — that much was evident, even to Patrick. And it was not, on second thought, Schumann. It was Brahms. Roger had had a thing for Brahms.

Roger was looking toward them now, peering up the hundred feet of windowless tunnel that separated him from Patrick and Gregory. Even at this distance, Patrick, gazing back down the dirty white corridor, could see where Gregory had come by his big damp eyes.

Patrick and the three-eyed rabbit stood watching Roger watch them. Now and then, people wearing backpacks or maneuvering wheeled suitcases came between them. The oncoming people pressed down on Patrick and the boy, and Gregory wrapped his arms around Patrick’s leg. What was interesting about this moment was the way in which Roger’s playing produced an occasion for what felt to Patrick like a bond between the men — it was music for male affinity, for courtship, for sharing — and, furthermore, between the men and the boy. Would Roger understand this? Gregory’s real parents, that early afternoon before the trip to visit the dying animals, were not Roger and Caroline, or even Patrick and Caroline, but Patrick and Roger.

“I guess we ought to say hello,” Patrick said to Gregory. “Come on, Bunny, let go of my leg.”

“Can’t!”

“Yes, you can. Knock it off.” He had to reach down and pull the boy off him. He anticipated tears, but in fact he was the one who felt like crying. This feeling came on suddenly. He said, “I’m going to pick you up. You’ll be safe and happy in the air! Are you ready to be happy?”

“Up!”

“Good boy. Let’s say hi to your daddy, and after that we’ll ride out to the zoo and see something tragic.”

Was he crazy? They’d never make their train this way. He knelt before the boy. Patrick held the journal in one hand. Now he reached behind Gregory, pressing the journal between his arm and Gregory’s back. His other hand went beneath Gregory’s arm. He got a grip on Gregory. He stood and brought the boy close to him, squeezing him with “Pond, with Mud.” He would have preferred to avoid carrying Gregory. Once up, the kid would be unwilling to go down. And lately he’d got heavy.

If only Caroline had been with them. On the other hand, though, maybe not. In truth, it occurred to him, he didn’t want Caroline there at all.

“Wait a minute, hold on, wait a minute,” he said to the Funny Bunny. There was something Patrick had to get down in the work-in-progress, before he forgot. It was about Caroline. He pictured her dressed for the office, with her scarf knotted over the buttoned top button of her starched white shirt, noosing her neck. Why had Patrick never before considered that knotted scarf in relation to the death of love? The scarf produced such obvious imagery. Obvious? Not too obvious.

What to do? How to get words down on paper? If he lowered the Bunny to the ground, there could be a tantrum and the day would be ruined. On the other hand, were he to try to open the book and take out the pen — well, forget it, it was out of the question. Could he persuade Gregory to climb up and ride on his shoulders, and in this way free his hands? But he wouldn’t have free hands, would he? He’d be holding Gregory’s knees, restraining Gregory from kicking him in the chest with the heels of his little rubber sneakers.

He carried Gregory down the tiled hall, against the rush of people entering from the street. He felt afraid. Why, all of a sudden, was he so full of fear? He knew the answer. It was simple. He wasn’t making his art. No, that wasn’t the complete answer. The complete answer was that he was not an artist. He was a person who let language dissolve into nothingness. Did that qualify as an insight?

Walking along the train-station tunnel, the boy cradled in his arms, he felt as if he were pushing through music — as if the music from the violin had become resistant, like a substance.

“Hello!” Patrick said too loudly to the violinist. “Brahms!” he exclaimed. Why was he talking like the boy? What an idiot he was. He’d become submissive. The only way he could make things worse would be to pull dollar bills from his pocket and toss them into the violin case.

With one arm, he held Gregory. He dug deeply into his pants pocket. Money and old tissues were wadded in a ball in Patrick’s pocket. He brought out a handful. There was no way for him to count the money. He held it up before his eyes. Twenties and fives.

“Gregory and I were on our way to the zoo! I took the day off. We thought we could maybe see a few wild animals before they have to quarantine them. That’s a joke. I guess it’s not funny.” And he said, “Right, Gregory? The zoo! Gregory, say hello to your father.” And with that he let a few bills flutter from his hand to the case on the ground. It was probably thirty or forty dollars.

Could anything have been meaner? Could he have been more cruel? Here was a demonstration of the power of a weak man over a weaker man. And there was more to come, when he shoved the money and the tissues back into his pocket and said, “Can I buy you a drink?” Patrick understood that he was not so much abusing the other man as punishing himself; they would drink together, the two men, and Patrick would buy, and he would get drunk enough to give himself credit for being a generous person. Later in the day, Roger might get up his nerve and punch him; but if he did he might injure his hand and be unable to play the violin for a while, and Patrick would be obliged to help him with a loan. There was no end to it.

“Drink?” the violinist said. Immediately he stopped playing and knelt to stow away his violin. He took care securing it in the case, but was speedy nonetheless. He needs a drink, Patrick thought. Patrick felt misgivings as he watched the violin-case lid come down over money that had recently been his. Roger snapped the case shut and stood up, and, a moment later, Gregory and his two fathers set out to waste the day sitting on stools in a dark train-station bar, a place off to the side, away from the sunlight, and populated with men who leaned down hard and unspeaking over their glasses.

There was no music in the bar. The place looked to Patrick as if it had been neglected by the architects who had recently completed the renovation of the train station. Had they forgotten about it? It had a linoleum floor and, in keeping with the historical standards for furnishings in these sorts of haunts, red vinyl booths, and walls painted a dark shade down low, toward the floor, and a lighter color up above. The ceiling was yellowing; certainly in another age, the seventies most likely, it had been white. All those burning cigarettes. All those people coughing themselves to death. Patrick imagined the dark bar full of coughers. There was something about the smell in the place, too. It smelled to Patrick like a hospital, or, faintly, like Roger, except saltier. This bar off to the side of the concourse was all that was left of the old train station; it reminded Patrick of the periods in modern literature when a decline in civilization is evident in the works of the poets. But when he thought about this he could not dream up any original lines that did not refer to cigarettes, or to the fact that lit cigarettes held in the air by drunks in dark rooms become little galaxies, spiraling.

Roger threw his violin case on the bar. This was a powerful move on his part. It showed that he had confidence in what he trusted (the hard case) to protect what he needed (the fragile violin) in order to maintain for himself some small place in which he could be a — what? A man in the world.

Patrick settled Gregory on a stool. Then, in an imitation of Roger’s confidence, he threw “Pond, with Mud” on the bar. This was a cavalier and companionable gesture. There would be time later to compose formal impressions regarding the experience of chucking his literary work around. In the meantime, he felt in his coat pocket for the fountain pen. There it was, clipped to the pocket’s lining.

The bartender came over. Roger asked for a beer.

“Sure thing, Roger,” the bartender said to him. “How’s it going today?”

“Money!”

“Good for you.”

This short conversation emboldened Patrick to order a drink suitable for the occasion. What was the occasion? And never mind that Scotch had been his father’s drink. In memory, Patrick could see the old man with a drink in his hand, inhaling from his cigarette in the night. Frankly, there came a point in each and every day when Patrick saw this image of his father.

“May I have a Scotch and soda?”

“Anything for the little guy?” the bartender asked, and, for a moment, Patrick was not sure what the man was talking about. He thought the bartender was referring to him — to Patrick. Little guy? Patrick caught on and said, “I’m carrying juice.”

He hauled the juice out of his coat pocket. He shook the bottle. He reached back into his pocket, got the miniature straw, and wiped it with a bar napkin. While wiping, he said, “Roger, I like your playing.” Where were those drinks? Patrick looked at Gregory and said, “How are you doing on that stool, Bunny? Comfortable? We can move over to a booth as soon as one opens up. Please don’t cry.”

“Bunny?” This from Roger.

“We call him that. Actually, we don’t call him that. I call him that. Right, Bunny? Are you my Funny Bunny?” Patrick had the juice ready. He held the bottle for Gregory to drink. Gregory, somehow managing to keep his balance on the elevated barstool, leaned over between the two men, took the straw expertly in his mouth, and, with his hair falling forward over his ears, hiding his face, began to suck.

Patrick said, “Yeah, good boy.”

“Yeah! Boy,” Roger exclaimed. Who was submissive now?

The drinks came, and Patrick put his money on the bar. Roger got his beer, and Patrick his Scotch; Gregory worked on his miniature juice; the three of them drank together. It was a moment of harmony produced — in that cosmic darkness that made the forlorn station bar a place apart from the world — by alcohol, the absence of women, and, Patrick thought, love.

“Shall we have another?” he asked.

“Another,” Roger answered.

“Here’s to being here,” Patrick said, hoisting his glass; and he had the feeling, as he made this toast, that there were all manner of things he wanted to say (and had for some time needed to say, now that he thought about it) to Roger. For instance, Patrick suddenly couldn’t wait to assure Roger that he and Caroline had been very upset when they’d discovered that he had lost his job teaching at the conservatory. But how to say this in words that would not be hurtful to the man’s pride? Also, was it a good idea for Patrick to let the deposed husband know that Caroline still cared for him? Was it wise for Patrick to mention Caroline at all? He felt himself on the verge of telling Roger that he was sure that he, Patrick, might be able to persuade Caroline to overlook a few of those child-custody legalities. Bury the ax. No one ever need raise his arm and strike anyone in anger again. Roger could drop by Patrick and Caroline’s apartment, have a beer or a glass of wine, play a lullaby on his fiddle, and hold his son for a few minutes. Roger didn’t look like a person who wanted to hurt a little boy. Did he?

It wasn’t Patrick’s place to make promises to Roger. It wasn’t his place to say anything to Roger.

Nonetheless he said, “Do you want to hold him?”

Patrick drank from his drink. In that instant, he felt at peace with himself — he could understand drinking. Caroline did not like Patrick to drink. Correction: Caroline didn’t like him to drink too much. It occurred to him then that the anniversary of their engagement was coming up in three days. Jesus! He had to think about a present.

The train-station bar was emptying. Patrick supposed that the men in the bar were leaving to catch trains to the suburbs. Either that or heading back to their jobs. Every now and then, the door to the bar would open, and light would flood in, briefly. The person leaving might stand silhouetted in this bright light, waving a hand at the drinkers left behind.

“So long. See you tomorrow,” the bartender called toward the door as it closed. The light disappeared, and the bartender brought Patrick and Roger one beer and one Scotch. He counted out money from the pile in front of Patrick. The money was wet, and there was tissue paper mixed with it.

“Do you want to hold him?” Patrick asked Roger again. “It’s all right if you don’t feel like it.”

“No,” Roger said to him.

“No? You don’t? Or you do? Want to hold the Bunny?”

The bartender came back carrying change. He put the change on the bar. “Will you be wanting anything for your little boy? Will you be wanting a glass of milk?”

Was the bartender addressing Patrick? Or Roger? Gregory had stopped drinking from the juice bottle and was leaning over against the rounded edge of the bar, his head pillowed on arms crossed beneath him, in the manner, and with the posture, of a child slumbering at a school desk. His eyes were closed. The juice was empty.

“He’s doing fine, we’re all fine, we’re great, thank you,” Patrick said. Patrick was drunk. Being drunk, he wondered why he was not more often drunk. Was that right? Grammatically speaking? Not more often drunk?

“You let me know,” the bartender said.

To Roger, Patrick said, “Gregory is tired. We should let him rest a minute. You can hold him later.”

Gregory’s real father had already finished his beer, Patrick noticed. How many did that make? In all? As for Patrick, he was not, when he spoke, slurring his words, though he feared he might slur his words were he not careful not to. Something like that. Between the two men, the boy slept. These two grown men gazed at each other through the dark, across the boy; and Patrick found himself wondering how old Roger was. Caroline had told him, but he couldn’t remember. In Roger’s eyes, Patrick saw the boy’s eyes. Roger’s face might or might not have been a predictor of the face Gregory would one day show to the world. Roger was unshaven, with hair growing down his neck, past the top of his shirt collar, which was unbuttoned to the third button, and lay open beneath the pea-green coat that needed cleaning, and which was either too large or too small for Roger — it was hard for Patrick to say which. The effect was tacky. No, “tacky” wasn’t the right word. Roger’s chest was white and skinny, the chest of a man who’d begun drinking before he was a man. And the tip of his nose was red — a red nose! Like Gregory, Roger had a rashy mouth. Whiskers went this way and that. His hair looked lifeless.

He could play the violin, though. Boy, could he! That was a hell of a lot more than Patrick could do!

Was it time yet to relocate from the bar to a booth? The barstools weren’t the most comfortable things.

“Bartender!” Patrick called. “Hit us!” And to Roger he said, “This is going to have to be it. I’m about out of cash.”

The men looked sadly at the money. It was true, there wasn’t much left. Would Roger offer to spend the money that Patrick had dropped in his case? It was not likely.

And, hey, where was “Pond, with Mud”? Had the bartender taken it and stashed it behind the bar? Had one of the miserable drunks walked off with it? No, there it was, next to the violin. It was safe.

To Roger, Patrick said, “You’ve hardly said a word all night. All day. My friend. Tell me something. I’ve told you things. I’ve told you that Bunny and I are on our way to the zoo. I’ve told you we were going to look at all the crazy animals. I’ve told you that you can hold your son. I want you to tell me something I can write down. Tell me something, fucker,” he said to Roger, and immediately regretted this. “I’m sorry. I am sorry.”

“Don’t,” the other man said.

Don’t? Don’t what? Don’t be sorry? Don’t say these things? Don’t apologize? Don’t ask Roger to apologize?

Roger placed his hand on Gregory’s back. He moved his hand gently, stroking the boy. As Patrick watched this, it came into his mind to say, “Don’t wake him.” Another “don’t.” Was that what Roger had meant? Don’t ask me not to touch my son?

“Gregory.” Roger said his son’s name. “Gregory.”

The boy’s face was wrinkled from lying against his arms and the edge of the bar. He was coming awake. How long had he been sleeping? What was the time? How could there be a bar without a clock?

Patrick removed his malfunctioning pen from his pocket. But by the time he’d got the pen out he’d forgotten his subject. His subject had been? What were his subjects? Patrick’s subjects were the usual subjects. There was another of his unfunny jokes. Patrick’s subject had been time. But he’d forgotten time. Why was he holding his pen? He put it away. Was it leaking? No, that wetness Patrick felt was water dripping on him from the bottom of his glass. How much had he drunk? Or maybe the wetness was a spot of ink soaking through the lining of his coat, staining his shirt above his heart.

And Patrick, unwilling or unable to allow himself to be vanquished by Roger, said, sharply, “Hey, everybody, I’m bleeding to death!”

That did it. That brought on the tempest. Could anything have hurt Patrick more than to hear the boy cry out at the sound of his, Patrick’s, voice?

“No crying, Bunny. Okay, no crying? No need to cry. I’m going to pick you up! You’ll be happy in the air! Are you ready to be happy?”

He looked across at Gregory’s father. One last look before leaving. He believed he knew in that instant what he saw in Roger’s eyes.

And with that he leaned close to Gregory, picked up the Scotch and soda from the bar, raised the glass to the boy’s lips, and said, “Here. Don’t cry.”