So he’s gotten good at being alone, since that is where he is and where he is going to be, and it isn’t the worst thing, is it? The movie-house daydream, a new book—he hopes they will carry him entirely, the story possessing him, its large life overwhelming his smaller one: it will tell him what to see, for exactly ninety minutes, the stream of things ordered into a story—he loves that. Anxiety, watching previews: is that what I’ll have to watch, is that all I will be offered? I need to see something, is this all there is to see? A kind of desperation in it: please bring me something scary, something absorbing, because I don’t have a choice but to see the movie….

In the movies you’re by yourself (even when you’re with someone, you’re by yourself) but not lonely. Is that a boon or a sadness? He’s sealed, away from the parents, in a glass coffin like Snow White’s, some chamber they can’t penetrate: fog-filled time machine, impervious cage of the ticket booth. Mother and father can’t touch him here.

Or did they put him in the chamber? Get him out of the way for a while, get him out of the way for good: send him off to the world of art, send him into shadowland. But he likes it there, resilient boy, though right now the lens seems to make him smaller and smaller, the only figure in all those rows. The screen is huge—movie houses weren’t divided then, just empty places bigger than any space I knew—so my weekend afternoon monsters were immense, daunting. What did it matter what they did or said? They were twenty feet tall. I, immense now, more present than that boy, an eye turned to scrutinize the way he’s wrapped his jacket around him to warm up, the jacket he’ll of course lose at the movies, I look at him and find him a distortion of a child my lens cannot correct.

4

Mikey

We live on East Twenty-second Street, a busy thoroughfare, on a strip of low-slung cinder-block ranch houses where there aren’t many trees to absorb the heat. Some of our neighbors have given up on lawns like the ones they had back East and gone to tinted gravel instead, and in the median strip that divides the whizzing traffic on East Twenty-second the town crew’s actually painted the dry grass a pale, chemical green. Some afternoons sandstorms blow up, “dust devils” my parents call them, but these cyclones aren’t made of dust but of gritty sand, stinging, blinding; they don’t last long but we kids caught out in them must double over, cover our faces, run to any shelter, but even then our faces and bare legs feel scoured.

I’ve made two friends.