“I found you!” I say, rushing toward them, hating the sight of them but needing to take hold of them, as if I were going to gather them up like lost children, and indeed my arms are nearly entirely around them when they turn their horror-stricken, imploring eyes to me, and recoil from my touch, shrinking, crying out in pain, in fear, and raise their impotent, shaking hands to beseech me not to hurt them again.

The Purlieus

The Purlieus

THE MAN SWAYED, looking at me, but somehow incompletely.

“Mind if I sit?” he asked. “I won’t say anything.”

I had the impulse to quit the bench and leave it to him. The day was passing, the lights would be coming on soon. I liked to sit here and watch them come on sometimes; it was a way of restoring myself a bit before the long train ride home. The man smelled like liquor, and his head drooped beneath a grey veil of heavy drunkenness I could almost see. He reminded me of someone I knew once, though, and the pang of memory kept me from getting up.

“Go ahead,” I told him.

He sat heavily, his hands between his thighs, slumped back against the seat. He threw his head back then and let it sag back, lifting his chin and shutting his eyes, which I now saw were bright with tears. I took him for a professional run up against some tragedy. He sighed, and sighed again, rubbed his face, and went slack, sighing.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, rubbing his face again, and seeming to draw his head from his shoulders with effort. I saw alarm flash in his eyes. “Am I disturbing you?” he asked me. “I’m sorry.”

He said this with such a woeful expression that I couldn’t help taking an interest in him.

“Things were so much simpler when we were kids,” he said.

I felt my interest start to evaporate.

“You know there wasn’t... all this...”

He waved his hand to designate “all this,” meaning perhaps the city, the traffic, the park, the passing of time, the crowds streaming on the distant sidewalks, the indifference of all this man-made business.

“Or, well, there was, but... none of it meant anything, you didn’t know what the hell it all meant, but you believed what they told you about it...”

I excused myself and began to get up.

“I remember...” he said, his voice becoming wistful, “... I read this book when I was a boy... I wish I could remember the name... Maybe you read it, too... It was set in England, around Edwardian times, on a country estate or something, something in the country, and it was about a boy who met this girl. Her name was... Snowy, I think... You okay?”

I did not return his look. I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Just a cramp. I get them sometimes.”