Page 5

FIVE

A nd then, suddenly, he’s there! Well, here. New York City.

Standing in the Port Authority Bus Terminal staring out onto Eighth Avenue, Eddie smells day-old garbage, not roasting chestnuts. He sees gritty sidewalks, not flowery rooftops. Signs for vape deals, not Broadway shows. People shouting, not singing. He swallows hard as he takes in all the action in front of him—the speeding cars, flashing lights, rumbling trucks, darting jaywalkers, blaring music, people moving in every direction. Some are walking briskly, like they are running late (they are). Some are pacing, like they are anticipating bad news (they are). Some are just standing, looking around, like they are waiting for something (they are). There are old people, young people, people in the middle. Smiling people, scowling people. Chic people, slobby people, harried people, calm people. Tall people. Short people. Fat, thin, loud, quiet, big hair, small hair, every color. There are probably more people on just this block than in the entire town of Mesa Springs. They whoosh past like waves of weather. So many people. So, so many people. They overwhelm him, and the familiar flavor of anxiety bubbles up in Eddie’s throat.

He retreats, just for a moment, just to feel some gravity. Tap into your imagination, Eddie. Make up some stories. What about that long-haired man carrying the purple guitar case? Maybe he’s catching a bus to Philadelphia for a gig at a big, multigenerational wedding. And that old lady methodically transferring her cigarettes from one box to the other. Could she be waiting for her son to arrive home, finally free from the penitentiary upstate? Tell me about the grizzled man with the anchor tattoo. Is he reminiscing about his tour of duty, forty years ago, when he was crammed with a dozen other young sailors into a bunkroom on a Navy submarine? Eddie lingers a bit on this last vision, picturing all kinds of explicit fantasies.

He exhales. The stories calm him. He takes out his phone and opens his contact list.

“I made it,” he says when Donna answers. “I’m at Port Authority.”

“Port Authority? Jesus. Get out of that cesspool before you get mugged.”

“Mugged?” Eddie hasn’t considered that version of New York yet.

“Forget I said that,” Donna says. “How will you get to Cookie’s?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Subway?”

“No. The subway is worse than the bus station. Take a taxi. Lemme know when you get there.”

“A taxi?”

“Just look for a line of yellow cabs on the street and get in one. I gotta go. Boss is staring at me.” She hangs up.

A taxi? Okay. He can do that. He squares his shoulders, hoists his duffel, and conjures confidence. He steps out onto the street and sees a row of cabs idling at the curb. He approaches the first taxi he comes to and opens the door.

“What the hell are you doing?” snaps a woman in the back seat, pushing him away with her foot. “You a moron? This is my cab.”

Eddie croaks an apology and the woman yanks the door shut. The taxi speeds off.

The next taxi pulls up, and this one’s empty. The driver, who’s wearing an NY Mets T-shirt with grease drips down the front, beckons Eddie inside. “Where to?” he barks as Eddie ducks in.

“119 Bedford Street,” Eddie says, double-checking the address in his notes app. “Yes, 119.”

“Cross street?”

“I—”

“Sixth? Seventh? Carmine? What?”

“I don’t know?” Eddie says, answering the cabbie’s question with a question.

The driver adjusts his rearview mirror, centering it on Eddie. “Look, kid, maybe you’re new to New York, but we don’t do numbered addresses here, okay? You gimme the street and the cross street, and then we go. That’s how it works. Get it? Let’s try again. From the top. Where to?”

“Bedford, um, Bedford and—”

Suddenly, an image emerges in the video screen on the back of the driver’s seat, stealing Eddie’s attention. It’s a photograph of a face, a beautiful face of a young man with pitch-dark hair and luminous, deep-set eyes. Eddie has no idea who it is, but the face teases a bone of recognition in him, like he knows this face, or should. Is this a movie star? Someone from television? The eyes seem to focus in on Eddie, like they’re alive. They seem to soften, like they’re smiling. Eddie feels his stomach flip, suddenly self-conscious, as if the young man were really here.

Maybe he is here, Eddie. This is New York, remember?

“Kid?”

Eddie, jostled out of the fantasy, opens the map app on his phone to find the cross street. But in this clumsy moment, he fumbles it onto the floor of the cab. “One second,” he says. “Sorry.”

“Meter’s running, kid. You wanna sit here all day? S’okay with me.”

Eddie grabs at his phone, but it slips out of his hands again, deeper under the seat in front of him. He sweeps his hand back and forth, hoping his fingers will reach it.

Just as he closes his fingers around it, a shout from outside. “Eddie! Eddie!”

Eddie, startled, looks up. He sees a man with one foot up on the curb, and one foot in the gutter, just feet away from the taxi, shouting. But he isn’t shouting at Eddie. Not our Eddie, anyway. He’s shouting at a different Eddie, somewhere across the street.

The cabbie is staring at him, or more precisely glaring at him.

“I don’t know the cross street,” Eddie says, flustered. He starts tapping at his phone.

“Kee-rist.” The driver pulls away from the curb with a jerk. “Forget the map. Lucky for you Bedford is only a few blocks long. We’ll find it.”

“Sorry,” Eddie says again.

“Relax, kid, I’m just bustin’ yer balls.” The driver laughs, then shouts out the window at a cyclist swerving out of the bike lane. “Move yer ass! We got bike lanes for a reason!”

It takes just ten minutes to careen downtown to Bedford Street, and Eddie grips the edge of the seat the whole way. The cab weaves through black town cars, shiny city buses, mosquito-like scooters, jerky jaywalkers. He catches fleeting glints of the New York he’d imagined—skyscrapers, yellow taxis, even a cart selling roasting nuts. But he never imagined it this dense, this thick, this loud, this heavy. How can anyone get anywhere they need to go, with so much in the way? How can they think, plan, feel, with all this weight towering above them? Maybe New York isn’t his destiny after all. Maybe he is just too small for this. Maybe this is too much. Maybe he’s not enough.

“Look out!” Eddie shouts as a graffitied delivery truck stops abruptly just in front of the cab. Eddie tenses his muscles, and for an instant he imagines the EMTs standing over his mangled body and shaking their heads. So young , they are saying as they lick ice cream cones from a Mister Softee truck. Such a shame. Eddie finds a split second of comfort in the vision, because it’s his, and he knows he can control it. He wills it away just as the driver swerves, missing the truck with inches to spare. Eddie yelps.

The driver smiles back at him in the rearview mirror. “Don’t sweat, kid. I’ve been driving this taxi in this town for a hundred years and I ain’t had a single passenger die. Not yet anyway.”

“A hundred years?”

“Just about!” the cabbie shouts as he slams the brakes and spins the wheel to dodge another truck. “Welcome to New York!”