Heaven is hell
In reverse
--Elvis Costello
SUMMER had not yet passed, but in the shadow of fall, an otherwise unremarkably beautiful morning took on a liminal and melancholic significance, an Irish wake celebrated on that narrow span between Labor Day and the autumnal equinox.
J. sat on a bench at the intersection of Broadway and 116th and watched north- and southbound cars and trucks and cyclists crest and break along the prow of the traffic median. In his right hand, he clutched a deck of cheap plastic-coated Duane Reade playing cards. He kept his eyes on the traffic while practicing a no-look one-handed shuffle. His thumb worried the cards, trying to feel the cut. Slowly, he split the deck in two and gently coaxed each half around his index finger, but when he tried to interleave the halves back together, the deck stolidly refused to merge. J. turned his attention wholly to the deck and increased the pressure. For a moment, he thought he felt the two halves sigh and begin to ease into each other. He pushed harder and the cards hiccupped, bowed out, and exploded in a firework burst.
J. often found himself up here in Morningside Heights, brushing shoulders with beatnik ghosts and cadging wounded soldiers unsteadily abandoned by ivied undergrads at The West End or nursing the nth free refill of coffee at The Hungarian while he fell in and out of love, peering over the top of some spine-broken, fragrant used book—bought or lifted from Labyrinth—propped in front of him, with the waitress with the hoop earrings or the waitress with intricate braids or the waitress with the redshift lips. So it's perhaps not surprising that, as dawn broke across Manhattan, J. had wandered due north from 72nd, up Broadway, serenaded by the city's matins of rattling storefront steel gates being deadlifted by shopkeepers and the susurrus of water hoses burnishing the sidewalks into mottled mirrors. Along the way, he devoured a Recession Special and only stopped for the first time in forty-four blocks at this bench to briefly rest the smoldering soles of his jump boots.
J. got down on his hands and knees to pick up the mess of cards before the crosstown winds scattered the cards into the road. He glanced up and almost fell into the azure sheet stretched across the sky. How could he possibly be expected to go to school on a day like this? To be fair, yesterday had also been too nice a day for school. Yesterday, J. kept on walking past P.S. 405 and caught the 2 at Flatbush Ave. into the city. It had all the bearings of a spontaneous gesture save for the nine hundred and forty-two dollars rubber-banded in a tight cylinder that seemed to burn against the inside pocket of his jacket, a white phosphor round drilling into his ribcage. Alea jacta est.
FOR his tenth birthday, J.'s mother sat him down at their Formica laminate kitchen table and cracked the cellophane off a box of Bicycle cards with a flourish of her wrist as she yanked away the plastic pull string and dropped the deck into her hand with the same gesture she used to extract the last Marlboro Red and attendant confetti of tobacco flakes from a pack, back before she quit.
"My pops taught me how to play when I was your age, and buddy, if he was alive, he would have taught you, too," she said, gesturing vaguely for J. to clear a space amongst the plates and glasses and candles and dry Entenmann's iced vanilla cake and casually unopened junk mail and willfully unopened bills so that she had enough room to scramble the cards. "There are a few variations. We'll start with stud. Or maybe draw. I always get them confused. It doesn't matter." Having reconstituted the deck, she placed it face down and slowly spread it out evenly from right to left, bifurcating the table. She placed her fingertips underneath the beginning of the line of cards and, with a ginger gesture, rolled them over in a low swelling wave. She laughed once, loudly, rocked back in her chair, and clapped her hands, infallibly delighted as she was by any and all unexpected successes, great or small.
