Homer's Dream
BOOK ONE
1
When I was twelve, my mother sank into a deep depression and I sat up with her at night, making tea, talking. That was when I pieced together the date of my conception, September 10, or more likely, early morning, September 11, 2001.
"Our last night together, we went to a late movie at the Bronx Plaza," she told me, "came back to my room, drank wine and ate pizza. The next morning, he headed off to the West Village to sell his jewelry off a blanket, and that afternoon, as I sat watching the footage of those buildings coming down, he called from New Jersey, saying he'd seen the plane hit the first tower, hopped the train to Newark to pick up his Aerostar, and was heading to Florida.
"He'd served in Iraq," she said, "and when the war came chasing him to New York, all he could do was run."
For a long time, she said, she mistook his running for fear—of his past, of her, of being a father—but only because she herself was afraid, of losing him, of being left with a responsibility, a child, she knew she couldn't handle.
"When buildings start falling, Little Man," she said, "and you're already living on borrowed time, you'd be a fool to stick around."
The next winter my mom and I moved again, like reverse underground railroad refugees, white mother and child (my dad was Colombian but more white than brown) being sheltered by a network of tias and aunties and amoos, this time to Tia Munello's apartment on East 141st in the Bronx where we slept on air mattresses in a corner of the living room behind sheets hanging from a clothesline.
The following fall, we moved to Morris Avenue, into a bedroom with a standing partition we shared with Amoo Feeren, a silent thickset woman from Iran who took in laundry, washing it in a machine in her kitchen and hanging it to dry on four lines with pulleys extending out the back window. The first week, my mom rose early, sent me off to my new school with a girl who lived below us, Josephina, but by the second week was again sleeping in, looking for jobs in the afternoon, the third week not coming home till the next day, saying her job-hunting was going late so she'd been staying at a friend's house, Amoo Feeren wordlessly sending me off to school each day, wrapping a cheese sandwich and juice box in a dish towel and stashing it in my backpack.
When my mother found a job as a cocktail waitress in Queens, which came with our own bedroom in the owner's apartment, I ran down the stairs to tell Josephina the good news.
"You can always come back and stay with Feeren," she said.
"Why would I come back?" I said.
"If you have problems," Josephina said. "If it doesn't work out."
But I didn't understand. I mean, I understood having problems, we always had problems, but I didn't understand how things could not work out.
My mother lasted three solid months working as a waitress, and the apartment was excellent, my mom's shift ending at five, the two of us eating dinner and watching movies, the owner spending evenings at the restaurant, till one day my mother came home early, agitated, saying the owner was running a morgue not a restaurant, too cheap to even invest in a few potted plants, and I knew the job was history.
Later that night, it came out that Social Services had tracked her down, each school I'd left reporting me as truant, and, unable to provide either paystubs or lease, she'd agreed to send me to Hell's Kitchen to live with my father's brother, Lanny, also a veteran of Desert Storm, who'd lost half a lung and collected disability, and also had a side hustle making hats. When once or twice a year my father came to visit, he'd stay with Lanny, my mom putting me on a train and sending me down for sleepovers, my dad taking the guest room, leaving me the sofa beside the dummies wearing hats.
"What about you?" I said to my mom. "Where you going?"
"Back to Feeren's," she said. "Help her with the wash. And if I agree to meet with a case worker, they say I can get Assistance."
This was the first time I'd ever seen my mother go back to anything, and I could see she wasn't pleased. I packed up my duffel bag with clothes, skateboard, and the science book series she'd been adding to over the years—Primates, Geology of North America, Space and Time, Marine Life, Dark Energy.
My mother walked me to the subway and, seeing the light of the approaching R train, turned to me. For a moment, I thought she was growing sad like the mothers in the movies we'd been watching and was going to say something hopeful to make herself feel better.
As the train barreled into the station, she stood before me, placing a hand on each of my shoulders. Then she took a step back, pressing her hands together at her chest and gazing at me a long moment. Finally, she drew her hands apart, as if opening a great set of curtains.
"Go," she said.
2
On one side of my room in Lanny's 3rd floor apartment the door leads me in the morning out and down to school, and on the other side the window leads each night out and up into the fire escapes circling the courtyard, stacked from the second story to the sixth.
One night, after treading upon every platform, every ladder rung, every rooftop, I'm chilling on a fifth-floor landing when this kid Connie startles me from the window, tells me his older brother's a marine from a climbing unit went to Afghanistan, and the next night the three of us are out there clamping cables and pulleys, the brother fitting us for harnesses, and a couple nights later, we've got a mad cool network of zip lines, cutting corners, crisscrossing open space, and stay out till dawn.
Two months later, the tardies and missed detentions piling up, the high school assigns me to meet with District Psychologist Bindermaus, his office at the end of my block, corner of 48th and 9th.
"Little Man," Dr. Bindermaus says, "all your important classes are in the morning."
"Day starts too early," I say. "And Astronomy isn't till period nine."
"You're headed down a slippery slope," he says.
I shrug my shoulders.
"Easier to get back on track sooner than later," he says.
"Nah, if I'm off it, I'm off it."
"I think you might be holding on to some grief."
"You talking about my mom giving me up?"
Dr. B sits there looking at me with his moon eyes.
"Gravity pulls bodies down to earth," I say, "but dark energy, which is 68 percent of everything, pulls them back out to space."
"It pulled you away from your mother?" he says.
"Didn't have to," I say. "She wasn't holding on."
Sun still out but below the roofline, Connie and I sling and clamber, carrying clamps and cable, angling down, one building to the next, installing new routes, climb back up, settle on our haunches on the level two escape and peep Dr. B's office where kids are gathering for Wednesday evening group.
Five boys of assorted shapes and shades settle into the sofa and chairs, arranged in a circle, all of em hang dog, Dr. B sitting with his back to the window, elbows on knees, leaning toward his wards, one of them, skinny white kid with blotchy skin and a buzzcut, gazing past him out the window, up toward where Connie and I sit, not seeing but sensing us.
The following Wednesday, Connie and I are on the first landing, bolt-clamping more cables, when outside Dr. B's open window, a slim figure walks over beneath us, jumps up and grabs the first rung, pulls himself up five more with only his arms, and joins us on the first landing.
"You a rangy dude," I say.
"I guess," kid with blotchy skin says.
Moved here from Iowa two years ago to live with a family friend, so we call him Seed, take him up the scape, then back down, staying off the newly strung cables till we can fit him with a harness, and the next Wednesday, the three of us watch from the first landing as the groggy unborn, including two dudes got kicked off the high school basketball team, Moses the big man and Smiley the point guard, gather in Dr. B's office.
We collect tiny pebbles from the rooftop, rain them down against Dr. B's window, and before long, Moses slips from the circle, raises the lower sash, squeezes his big frame out into the courtyard, locates the ladder, and ascends. Then Smiley comes slithering out, Dr. B behind him absorbed in the circle. Little later, a third guy, lighter-skinned, slips out and climbs up, telling us how he came from Tunisia, his dad having to sell his taxi so he could buy him a ticket to New York and put him on a plane with sixteen dollars.
We knock on Connie's living room window, send the newbies in for gear, Connie's brother restocked, saying he'll cover these guys but from now on motherfuckers gonna have to pony up.
Spring days growing longer, I sit above the courtyard on the roof edge of my building as the night presses down, creating a film against the city light, each night a few more creatures emerging from windows, from the dark mouths of alleys, on Wednesdays through Bindermaus's window, nylon harnesses rustling, carabiners clinking, figures gliding before me through dim shafts of light from shade-drawn windows.
Drizzly Saturday afternoon, few of us grab sodas at Pablo's on 48th, huddling beneath the awning out front, and it comes out that Smiley's sister, Tanika, and this sassy, round-faced chick from my Astronomy class, Sheila Camato, have been climbing in Bryant Park.
Courtyard maxed out anyway, once the rain stops and night comes, the six of us go check them out, entering off 6th Avenue, sitting on a bench, gazing up at the light gathering against the leafy ceiling.
After a few minutes, we walk further in, a few solitary figures slumped on benches along the path, hear a rustle above, then nothing.
Unable to see through the canopy of leaves, I lead the others up the nearest lamp post, balance on the post's glass dome and one-arm it through the leafy shield into the darkness, find a branch thick enough to hold.
Inside, our eyes adjust and we continue up a rope ladder rising through twisted branches to a small plank landing where we see a cable across an air hollow leading to more ladders, free hanging ropes, wood-plank landings, zip lines.
"What the fuck you doing, Smiley?" says a voice from above.
"Chillin," Smiley says.
"What about you, Little Man?" says a second voice, sounds like Sheila.
"Chillin with my boys," I answer.
"You all snoopin," first voice says.
"How many you got up here, Tanika?" Smiley asks.
"Three too many now," Sheila says, and we hear a rustle of leaves and see a body, must be Tanika, who's half a head taller than Smiley, fly off into space and disappear in the darkness. Then more rustling, and the three of us twist our necks to see Sheila ascending a higher ladder, stopping to take in the view, holding on with one hand, passing her other hand through the air before her as if wiping clear the world below, including us.
Friday night, Seed stays in to Facetime with a buddy back in Iowa, and the five of us join the growing numbers in the courtyard, up to forty-five or fifty, then fold our harnesses into backpacks and head over to Bryant Park, in which we find the same snoozing souls on benches but not a quiver in the trees.
"Must a migrated north," Moses says, and we head further uptown, cross 59th street and enter Central Park, into Hallet Sanctuary, stopping halfway around The Pond.
We scrabble up a rock face and grab a branch, swing ourselves up and see a small platform made of two-by-fours, a launch pad for a zip line clamped around the tree trunk. One at a time, we zip deeper into the trees, gather on the next platform and peer ahead, seeing as our eyes adjust what appears to be a figure strapped to a slowly rotating dial, some kind of Vitruvian chick, and further still, a body dropping untethered into a net, bouncing back up into the branches and swinging off, a group materializing to the side, five or six women on a platform twice the size of the one we're on, their dark figures pulsing in the underwater darkness, moving together in some sort of slow motion dance or maybe tai chi.
"Some kind a dream up here," Smiley says, and we stand in silence until the spell is broken by a zinging sound, a figure flying at us feet first, nearly kicking Moses' head, landing like a paratrooper on the edge of the platform and unclipping from the line.
"What you think you're doin?" It's Hellcat, meanest teacher in the high school.
"We followed you all over from Bryant," I say. "Still just girls?"
"Word you looking for is women," Hellcat says. "What's that make you, boys or men?"
"Shit," Smiley says, and he reaches up, grabs the cable. But before he can lift himself, Hellcat clamps him by the wrist, staring into his face.
"Not if you a child," she says.
"He ain't," Moses says. "Might say some stupid shit but he know better."
"Show me," Hellcat says.
"What?" Smiley says.
"What you know."
Moses unzips his backpack and withdraws his harness. "We been climbing in the courtyard back of these boys' apartments," he says, nodding toward Connie and me.
"I know all about that courtyard," Hellcat says. "Question is, where you think all that climbing gon take you?"
"Right here," I say.
"Oh yeah?" she says, zeroing in on me. "You come to dance with the dickless?"
Not sure how to answer, I look from Hellcat to my boys.
"Huh?" Hellcat says. "This where you mean to be?"
Moses steps forward. "You ain't scaring us off," he says.
Hellcat glares at each of us, one at a time. "Okay then," she says, clipping back onto the line, leaning back against it, widening her stance, "but it's awful dark in there," and she rides off into the trees.
"More nightmare than dream," Smiley says, but the rest of us are already moving, Moses sidling over to the tai chi group, his hulking figure absorbed into their slow liquid rhythm, Muzzy and Seed climbing up to a higher zip line, Connie scrabbling past them to the very highest branch, straightening to a stand and swan diving into the open space, tucking as he reaches the net, rolling, bouncing into the opposite stand of trees, darkness closing behind him.
Smiley looks at me, unsure.
"Gotta just go with it," I say.
I lift my shirt over my head, tuck it in my waist, clip on to the line Hellcat took, and I'm gone.
Waking in the afternoon, I hear the television and wander into the den, Lanny today in a grey twill fedora.
"Look who's on the news," he says, Dr. B standing beside a podium behind which is a dude with a white brushback and pin-stripe suit, "NYC School Board Chairman" written on the bottom of the screen.
Chairman steps back and Police Chief steps up, saying they are prepared to do whatever it takes "to bring these kids back into the fold." Next, the City Controller says the Mayor has released ten million dollars from the city's Emergency Fund, and finally its Bindermaus' turn.
"The key," he says, "is developing new programming in the schools. Otherwise, we will see continued attrition."
"If they're not in school, what are the children doing?" a reporter calls out.
"What children everywhere do," Dr. B says. "Falling through the cracks."
"Gotta watch out for them cracks," Lanny says.
"Maybe we're ascending through em," I say.
"Ascending?" Lanny says. He smiles, shakes his head. "You sound like somebody fixin to climb out a window."
"Courtyard's history," I tell him. "We've been hanging in Central Park, a little farther north each night."
"You going up to Harlem?"
"Far as it takes to get past the lights."
I give Lanny some skin and head out through the door, stashing an extra water bottle with the harness in my backpack, June nights getting warm.
By midnight, must be two hundred of us working new routes in Central Park's North Woods when we hear a loud thunk, a stand of lights blazing into the trees from Central Park West, bodies scrambling for the shadows, scurrying to higher elevations, and we hear Dr. B's voice over a loudspeaker.
"We are here," he says, "because you are valued."
We scamper to a line to take us toward the northern boundary, but when we reach the platform, another stand of lights clunks on from Central Park North, and Hellcat redirects us along a rope course they've set up heading east.
We swing from rope to rope, descend to the ground and cross East Drive, hurry past Harlem Lake, people ahead splitting toward different exits, continue across 5th Avenue and onto Lexington where we catch the number 4 back downtown.
"I'm telling you the same thing I told Consuela Erebus," Bindermaus says from behind his desk, leaning back and to the side, necktie hanging straight as Foucault's pendulum.
"You mean Hellcat," Moses says, sitting beside me on the sofa.
"It's a matter of numbers," he says.
"Chasing us won't bring us back," I say.
"Little man, we've got teachers losing their jobs. Families that don't know where their children are. You've taken this too far."
"We haven't taken it anywhere," I say.
"You're unraveling entire communities."
"Then they shouldn't been raveled," Moses says.
Bindermaus walks out from behind the desk, lowers himself into the chair beside the sofa. "We're starting a new program," he says. 'Drop Out-Drop In.' You agree to meet with me and a vocation counselor once a week and we'll give you a bi-weekly stipend of 94 dollars."
"Don't have to do anything? Just have to agree?" I say.
"Yep," he says, returning to his desk, locating a form for each of us, sliding them over for us to sign, which we do.
"Change can't be achieved all at once," he says. "It has to be a process, one step at a time."
"Maybe if you're playing a board game," I say.
Dr. B. pulls in a deep breath, stands and walks to the window. "When I was a junior in college," he says, gazing out toward the slice of sky above the far roofline, "spring term classes ended on Tuesday and finals started the very next day." He glances back to see if we're listening. "Instead of going to finals, the entire student body gathered on the main lawn for three days, giving speeches, chanting, playing music. Our own little 1990s Woodstock."
"So what happened?" I ask.
"They permanently changed the schedule, adding a two-day study period before finals." He turns back to us. "Not saying we changed the world, but we had an effect."
"Sound like you made the semester two days longer," Moses says.
"Because we were improving the system, the quality of the product we were paying for."
"And with the extra two days, they probably raised the price," I say.
"Tuition was going up anyway," he says.
"I'm sure it was," Moses says.
3
Strangest feeling, the air around me solidifying in one particular spot and pressing against my shoulder. I am ascending toward the clouds, rising like vapor toward thin air, but the nudging on my shoulder persists, until finally I wake and see chubby-cheeked Sheila hovering over my bed, open window behind her.
"It's a pufferfish," I say.
"What up, Little Boy?" she says.
"Little Man," I correct.
"Shit," she says.
I make room and Sheila slides under the cover, lays on her back beside me, after a few minutes raising an arm, pointing at the ceiling.
"Orion's belt," she says.
"Sure," I say.
"Them three stars are a thousand light years away."
"How far's that?" I say.
"Didn't you listen in class?" she says. "Farther by the second, everything being pulled away from everything else."
Sheila leans in, wraps both arms around me, hooks her thigh over mine.
"Doesn't feel like you're being pulled away," I say.
"Gravity tryin keep me close," she says, "but that dark energy's always pushing out."
"So we can hook up," I say, "but we'll just get pulled apart."
"That's right," she says, "makes no difference if we do or don't," and she nuzzles her face into my neck, moving up and finding my mouth with hers.
On my way out at dusk, Lanny tells me Cammy, my dad, is on his way to Hell's Kitchen from the Canary Islands where he's been selling Yankee jerseys and Beyonce posters on a beach-side promenade.
Next day, Lanny wakes me at noon, calling me into the den, and there's my dad, wearing a short-brimmed straw fedora, neatly edged white hair beneath it, face leathery and clean-shaven, thick stripes running across his shirt, pin-stripes running down loose navy pants. Looks like some street clown got tangled up with a merchant marine.
Soon as we sit down, my dad says "Oh shit" and skips out to Pablo's, returning with coffee, bagels, and beer, declining Lanny's offer of a ten-spot, and by late afternoon, the two of them are sitting at a table of empty beer cans, trying to get me to join them.
"I flew over three continents and three seasons," my dad says, "just to lay eyes on my own natural born." He takes a long look at me sitting on the sofa. "You're doing fine," he says, "I can see that."
"Quit school and got no job," Lanny chortles. "Damn right he's doing fine!"
"I can see it in your eyes," my father says. "Purpose. Keep following your inner lights, Little Man."
"Okay," I say.
"Don't go chasing no fast money or false promises. Cause in the end, all you got is your inner compass."
"In the beginning too," I say, not seeing how such things change over time.
My father sits there studying me, Lanny beside him looking from him to me, back to him.
"Your grandad used to say, 'Can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you ain't got no boots,'" Cammy says.
"Then at the other end," Lanny says, nodding his head, "you got people born on third base thinking they hit a triple."
I go back to bed, rouse at dusk to head out for the night, and wake the next afternoon to Lanny and Cammy's voices, find them in the den, Lanny sitting in his easy chair, my dad standing, butt-nudging the TV stand.
"Yes there is," Lanny says. "What you want and what you got."
"Where you are and where you're going," says Cammy.
"Don't forget where you've been," Lanny says.
"I could never," my father says.
"No difference between em," I say. "You're just a couple of bodies moving through space."
"True true," Lanny says. "That's why you got to roll with things."
"How bout we get us some donuts?" my dad says.
"Pablo's?" Lanny says, and the three of us head out, my dad walking in the middle, bounce-stepping, cheerful, cause he's with his boys, and because he won't be for long.
"Catching that 6:30 flight," he says on the way back, totin a box of Entenmann's cinnamon donuts. "Stopping in Savannah for a couple days, then back to Tenerife."
"What you got in Savannah?" Lanny asks.
"Some dude wants to see my olivine collection."
Lanny shakes his head. "Man could sell a sleigh ride to Santa Claus," he says.
Stopped at a red light on the corner, my father looks at me. "What you think of your old dad?" he says.
"I'm glad."
"Glad what?"
"Glad you got something cooking."
"Cooking hot," Lanny says.
My dad reaches over and musses my hair. "You were always like that," he says. "Always gave me the benefit of the doubt."
"Never had any doubt," I say.
"You see?" my father says to Lanny. "You see this son of a bitch? Never had any doubt. I'm going to cut you a big share of the profits, Little Man. Just you wait and see."
By the time we get back and polish off the donuts and a pot of milk and sugar Lanny warms up, it's time for my dad to catch the train to JFK, slinging his satchel over a shoulder, tipping his straw hat forward, and saying with all the fatherly earnestness he can muster, "Always remember, Little Man . . ."
"What?" Lanny says. "Remember what?"
My dad looks at Lanny. "I forgot!" he says.
"That's why you need him to remember!" Lanny bellows.
My dad looks at me and shrugs. Then he tips his hat and hustles off to catch that train.
At dusk, I grab a PB n J, peek in at Lanny nodding in a white fedora with sky blue sash, fighting to stay awake in front of the TV, and head out, take the A train down to Canal Street, walk crosstown to the Manhattan Bridge, evening traffic sliding up onto and down off it, Brooklyn Bridge to my right, half the Williamsburg visible to my left.
That's some serious engineering they got spanning this river. Doesn't accomplish anything, moving people across one way just so they can come back the other, but it's still cool. Well, I think, let's see how tall this Manhattan Bridge is.
I follow the outer walkway to the first tower, climb up a section of girders and find ladder rungs on the Brooklyn side of the tower, scooch it up two-thirds of the way to a small platform, eyeball the Brooklyn Bridge, and in the distance the hazy outline of the granddaddy of them all, the Verrazzano.
"Always looking for a party, ain't you?" It's Hellcat, sitting above me on top of the tower, feet dangling.
"Am I late?" I say.
"Just me over here," she says, and flips on her phone light, waves it, and I follow her gaze over to the Brooklyn Bridge where at the top of the west tower, two lights blink on and jiggle.
"Sheila and Tanika," Hellcat says. "More women on the way."
I pull myself up to the top and sit beside her.
"You traveling solo tonight, Little Man?"
"Checking shit out," I say. "Wondering how much room they got up here."
"The Brooklyn's bigger," she says, tipping her head that way. "Got ladders going up inside the towers, more room on top. But I like this one—" she slaps both hands down on the steel surface beneath her. "And then there's the Williamsburg." Hellcat turns to the Williamsburg Bridge, now in full view, suspension cables strung with lights, headlights flashing along the roadway through cross-hatch girders.
"And if necessary," she says, "I suppose we could take that A train out to the Verrazzano."
"You think?" I say.
"Don't nobody do nothin till they have to."
"But you don't have to."
"I saved up a lot of years, Little Man, living with my mother and her sister, working summers, padding my account. You can spend your whole life tryin fat up, thinking that gon help, gon protect you from something."
Hellcat stands up, walks to the far edge, turns back, performs an exaggerated curtsy, and disappears over the side. Second later, I see her below sliding down a rope, and by the time I get to the bottom, she's a shadow sliding off the bridge, flitting along the water-side walkway toward the Brooklyn.
Next afternoon, I text the boys, and soon's night comes, Moses, Connie, Muzzy, and Seed, still no Smiley, meet me at the base of the Manhattan Bridge's west tower. We free-climb to the first landing and turn to watch a line of figures emerge from the darkness, moving out onto both suspension cables, lugging backpacks filled with gear up onto the towers.
The five of us climb to the top level where four crowning orbs sit like giant closed tulips. Seed eyeballs one and, rangy farm boy he is, grips the steel petals from the underside and pulls himself up, one handhold at a time, settles at the top on his haunches, straddling the pointed tip.
"Can you see Tunisia?" Muzzy calls up.
"I don't climb for the view," Seed says, talking down between his knees.
"I know, right?" Moses says. "Everybody always talking bout the view."
"Tryin get up high where they can look down on shit," Connie says. "Grab that top perch."
"I don't climb to see more," Seed says, "but less," and he tells how back in Center Point he used to climb silos, then the radio tower across from his house where they had this hang-out spot three-quarters of the way up, till one day a kid fell off and died, and how that night at dinner, Seed's dad, who never uttered a word at the table, said, "Maybe now you'll stop your foolishness," and how the next day Seed and his boys climbed up the tower, disconnected their hang-out platform, and moved it to the very top.
I'm mid-zip on the Brooklyn, this one and the Manhattan swarming with bodies, when a search light flashes in my eyes from above, pans over and stops on the east tower, a group of figures scattering. The sound of a second helicopter jacks up the racket, and a second light crosses the first one, scuttles across black water to the Manhattan.
I catch up to Moses on the far side, the first light on us, off us, on us again, and we skitter down and scurry along the walkway to South Street, meet a mob of women coming off the Manhattan who fan out, dispersing into downtown.