The Commuter Challenge

A teenage boy strides across the park’s grassy slopes, avoiding the well-lit gravel pathways. He doesn’t want to be at home but there’s nowhere else he needs to be. He is simultaneously bored and anxious. The summer evening air is warm and still. On a nearby rise he spots a telescope on a black-legged tripod. Curious, he walks over. The barrel is crimson and bigger around than his leg. He stands beside the instrument. Nobody’s around. He leans over to peer into the eyepiece, gingerly, to avoid touching anything. Had the old man who owns the telescope been present and invited the boy to have a look, he would have declined. Instead the owner is currently comatose, and will be pronounced dead of a cerebral aneurysm before the next shift change at the ER. There was little the paramedics could do by the time they found him, slumped in the driver’s seat of a parked car. He had called 911 from there — stumbling back to the car in a panic, where his cellphone sat in his jacket pocket, after the headache had begun and he found himself unable to focus. He had set up his telescope in good cheer, as the sky was clear and moonless and sure he was alone but he was used to that (he had friends but none interested in astronomy), only 68 minutes ago, as sunlight reflected off the rings and upper atmosphere of Saturn back towards the inner solar system, a tiny sliver of which threads its way into the lens and eyepiece of the telescope just as the boy leans over, 68 minutes later, and finds himself riveted by the unexpected sight, one that he has certainly seen in photographs but never before, he realizes, with his own eyes.

“How was it?”

“Intense.”

“In a good way?”

“Yes! Except for the exit procedure. That sucked.”

“But it was worth it?”

“Definitely. It’s … like nothing else. You should go.”

“I do have a vacation coming up. Conscious Life, it’s called?”

“If you go, look into the blue whale option. I heard good things about that.”

“John?!”

“Marcia.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“Why??”

BANG

I remember the day the front porch light bulb burnt out. It was May 22, 2006, and that Cessna had hit the Williams’ house so early in the morning, and the fire trucks and ambulances and police cars were driving up and down the street most of the day and nobody could get any peace. I put on my hat (that fedora I later lost in Campoalegre) and revved up the Studebaker for a trip to the waterfront. I swerved all over the road, keeping an eye out for stray Cessnas. I drove by Mrs. Congreve’s house to see how she was recuperating, but her house had been converted into a liquor store. The proprietor informed me that the building had always been a liquor store, a claim I found dubious. I resumed my trip to the waterfront, which is a place that typically soothes my nerves. I found an ideal parking spot and had just begun my walk along the boardwalk promenade when I was accosted by a woman who insisted that she remembered me from school. I had no recollection of the woman, but nevertheless we spent hours talking and reminiscing. We ate lunch out of vending machines and enjoyed the salty air until I tired of her company and left her with the wrong phone number (your phone number). On the way back home I saw what was either a UFO, or a cloud, or a helicopter. A note tacked to my front door notified me that everyone had gone to the Stevensons’ to gawk at Daphne, who had fallen in the well. While I was reading the note, the porch light popped and went dark. And I remember it all vividly, because that was May 22, 2006: the day the front porch light bulb burnt out.

Julie and John hosted the backyard barbecue. Julie was Japanese-American. John was Manhattan-American (his term). Their matching blue aprons read “KISS THE COOK”. A rectangle of electrical tape changed her C to a G; a small square of painter’s tape changed one of his Os to a C. Most laughed. Kevin laughed uncomfortably.

After Reno, they had to hitchhike.