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EIGHTEEN

A fter some time (what is time?) they come up for air, leaning into each other and watching the lights of the city from the river. At first, the skyline is low, with only the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building standing above the rest.

But as they drift, the skyline changes. Buildings rise, and fall, and rise again. Eddie recognizes some—the World Trade Center, the towers of Madison Square, Hudson Yards. They sprout like flowers, then recede like vapor as the boys float downstream and around the Battery. Francis steers them up the East River where the Brooklyn Bridge appears and then vanishes. And then the Manhattan Bridge. And the Williamsburg Bridge. The Domino Sugar building, the UN building, the Queensboro Bridge. One after the other they appear and disappear, rising and falling, like time.

Francis whispers, “What do you want, Eddie?”

It’s that question again. That relentless, unanswerable question, that plague. Except from Francis’s lips, the question doesn’t scare Eddie. Here, now, for the first time, he has an answer.

“I want this,” Eddie says, burrowing into Francis’s chest. “I want forever.”

But you already have forever, Eddie. Can’t you feel it in your hand? It’s not an impossible possession. It’s not off in the distance, not a limitless expanse. It’s not even big. Forever is small. It begins and ends before you can even say its name. Forever is this instant, this thought, this breath, this pulse, and it is everything, the only thing. The future, the past—these are only ideas. The breath you just took is only a memory, your next breath only a possibility. They don’t exist, because they are no more, or they are not yet. There is only here, and here is everywhere. There is only now, and now is forever.

There is only us.

With Eddie’s head in his lap, Francis blinks up at the stars, watching them churn in the sky, marking the years, the decades, the generations, time and light and infinity, everything he knows and doesn’t know.

“Yes,” he says. “Forever.”

They pass silently under the bridges, up the Harlem River, back into the Hudson, floating slowly, gently, safe in their skiff. They skirt a city of millions, unnoticed, the only two people in the world.