North Side Of The Moon

The afternoon was Saturday, and it was in the spring. Jack sat on the park bench, feeling old. He’d folded his old man hands and draped them over his pauchy belly. The fractaled skin of his fingers hung a little loose around the knuckles when he flexed his fingers. He remembered seeing his grandfather’s hands like that — the malady he’d called “Arthur” folding him like origami — and thinking he must be hundreds of years old. Jack wasn’t that old, unless you gave him life experience credit. If he knew where to apply, he’d be hearing his name on the morning show, maybe getting a call from the president.

It was in the spring and that meant the sidewalk café across the street was full of couples. Young couples, mostly, wearing spandex one-piece biking suits, their helmets slung on the chairs behind them. They corralled their bicycles in the park’s rack and sprinted across the street, even though the sign clearly said, Do Not Leave Bicycles Unattended in the Park. Jack would point this out to the first cop who strolled by, if he thought that would do any good. The cop would just say, look there’s plenty of room left, and which one is your bike, anyway, and Jack would have to admit that he took the bus.

That afternoon, if Homeland Security measured such things, they would assess Jack’s crankiness at Level Orange.

Jack returned his gaze to his hands, half expecting the skin to start peeling off, blowing away like bits of paper in the cool breeze. Peeling off and blowing away, layer by layer like the joys of life.

Like Marian. He’d held out hope that she’d come back, that she’d realize life with him was better than being alone, but then she’d fallen ill, and when he visited her in the hospital she didn’t know who he was. The kids didn’t want him involved in deciding her care, and so she died in a nursing home.

Other joys faded more slowly, as if mounted atop a wall he couldn’t scale as high as strong as fast as often. Then a stockade behind a bastion surrounded by a moat on an island protected by landmines in a country to which he had no visa.

And there was the work. If it was hand work or back work or muscle work he’d done in his life, building houses to shelter or bridges to allow people to cross a river, ships to cross an ocean or fly from city to city, he could look back on something he’d done, point to it and thump his chest with pride (and a little care — chest pounding made his asthma flare up.)

Head work, though, is so ephemeral, especially when it’s crass, commercial. If he’d taken his journo degree to a city paper, insisted on a reporting job, or gone on to graduate school, maybe he’d have written something worthwhile, something that people would remember. Not only ads.

The only thing he had left was his heartbeat. Pounding away, even past the point of demand.

A couple of kids flew by on skates, shouting words he couldn’t understand, knees and elbows wrapped to the point that he felt surprised they could bend. Plumes of dust stirred up behind them, catching a paper straw in their wake.

To his left, Jack saw a blur of yellow motion. A small tabby cat, crossing in front of him, jabbing at the paper, darting and bobbing, reminding Jack of a boxer.

“Come here, Cassius,” Jack said, surprised that a name comes so quickly into his mind. He and Marian had gone round for weeks, trying to name the kids, only finally pulling something out of a hat when it came time to sign the birth certificates.

The kitten stopped. Seeing Jack, he wavered, as if deliberating whether he could maintain an aloof detachment or admit that Jack had startled, and thus intrigued, him. Finally, he turned and pounces, landing on the bench two feet away.

Jack offered a finger, remembering that cats like to think they’re making the first move. Cassius extended his neck toward the finger, and Jack felt the cat’s purring vibrate up through his hand. Cassius stretched, landing his paws on Jack’s leg, kneading trousers with his claws.

Several minutes passed this way, Jack stroking Cassius, who responded by arching his back and purring even louder, so loud that he seemed to vibrate in harmony with Jack’s own breathing, with the beat of his heart.

And then Cassius, as if waking from an enchantment, turned his head, bit Jack hard on the hand, and jumped onto the sidewalk.

“Cassius?”

The cat bounded into the street. A driver, travelling too fast for the parkway, hit the brakes hard, filling Jack’s ears with the sound of screaming brakes.

Cassius hopped back then leapt forward. A car going the other direction stopped suddenly, blocking Jack’s view.

Jack, unable to move, held his breath.

More cars passed, then a break. Jack could once again see the café across the street. The couple closest to the street. A yellow tabby in the woman’s lap.

Jack smiled. He thought of bridges and crossings. He thought of walking across the street and checking out the menu, following Cassius to see what the park looked like from that vantage.

He’d take the crosswalk, though.

He’d never have work like that again. What a thing to know at only twenty-two. What a thing to be thinking, three stories down from the beam he’d just vacated, tibia jutting bloody and jagged from the gaping hole in his right leg.

The men, his mates, yelling soundlessly and pointing, scrambling up and to the ropes. He waved back at them and said, “I’m OK, I don’t feel a thing,” but all he heard was the whoosh of the wind, the drone of a two-prop plane flying out and away over the East River.

The construction super got there first, a frightened expression making him a stranger, concerned for once over something more than slipping deadlines and budget overruns. “Stay still, Michael,” he whispered. “Fall any farther, I’ll be short a man for the rest of the day.”

“Don’t worry, Boss,” Michael answered. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Pain came when the sounds of work returned, and Michael retreated into a well of darkness. He awoke alone in the sterile, white room. His leg, suspended above the bed, felt like his head, gauzy and dull, pounding out telegrams from some remote region of the earth. In some part of his mind, Michael thought this a good thing. The leg was still there.

Over the next weeks, every one of his workmates came by at least once. Most stood awkwardly beside the bed, speaking awkward nothings, staring at the same spot six inches above his head. Michael wondered what was on the wall that they found so entrancing.

Patrick was different, him sprawling in a chair at the foot of the bed. His visits were an hour of lascivious and vulgar comments about the nurses, the stupidity of bosses. Patrick made plans as casually as the nurses changed Michael’s bedpan. Elaborate details of bars they’d visit after work, brawls they’d start and finish, women they’d conquer.

When he could finally stand, Michael understood the aversion he’d seen in his buddies’ eyes, the hesitation in the doctor’s voice, the voice in his own mind, looking up at the iron skeleton of the building he’d never see finished.

Michael’s remaining time in the hospital was only to learn to use a cane and to walk in the shoes that compensated for a right leg now a full inch shorter than the left, held in place by a cast iron rod.

Michael limped out of the hospital alone, into a world of chaos and frenzy. Traffic — buses and cabs, horns and heads out windows. Newsstands and street vendors, office workers in suit and and tie. Shop girls in pairs, matching blouses that fluttered in the breeze.

For three months, he’d not seen a piece of paper not clipped to a board, felt a breeze not thrown off from a fan. The world was insane with random motion, every piece of littered wrapper on a journey, every one of the thousand people he could see in one sweep of his surroundings on a course to some destination, grand or mundane. Self-propelled, independent.

Michael struggled to keep his right foot pointed in the same direction as his left. He struggled to lift his leg off the ground. He struggled to reach the park across the street, and then to collapse onto an empty bench.

The sun had begun its rise above the hospital. Its glare lit the grid of a new building going up a few blocks away. Mounted on a crane above the top floor, a flag flapped in the wind. It would be a treacherous day on the job.