Between Here and April by Deborah Copaken Kogan

Author:Deborah Copaken Kogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2007-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

I SAW HIS GAUNT figure leaning up against the plate glass window of B&H Photo, blowing smoke rings from a thin cigar, held between forefinger and thumb, each perfect circle stretching into an oval before disintegrating into the frigid air. “What take you so long?” he said, shivering. The words were spoken calmly, without reproach, but he wasn’t smiling.

“That’s a joke, right? I got here as fast as I could.” Barely fifteen minutes had passed between Renzo’s call and the three short stops on the C train to Thirty-fourth Street.

His face melted, his trademark tabula rasa replaced by a sly grin. “Yes, of course, it was joke.” His once boyish eyes had spawned deep crows feet along their edges, tiny switch brooms stretching all the way to his temples, while the eyes themselves had grown wetter, calmer, more amused, making his face seem both harder and softer than the frayed mental snapshot I’d been carrying around for so many years. “But also not. I mean what take you so long, in bigger sense.” He stubbed out the remainder of his cigar on the side of the building and placed it in his breast pocket for future use.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He ushered me into the store and took his place in line behind the other customers awaiting their turn to hand over their knapsacks to the Hasid manning the bag check. “It means, well, come si dice . . .” He stared up at the green baskets chugging along the ceiling-mounted tracks. “I keep wondering, all these years, when it is you will come back to life.” His eyes met mine.

“To life?” I held my palms out in front of my breathing, conscious self. “Uh, in case you haven’t noticed, Renzo, I’m not dead.”

“I know that. I mean this life. Real life.” He gestured toward the photographers hustling in and around the store, the two in front of us discussing the relative merits of the various Mac computers for transmitting pictures, the two behind us trading stories of auto-focus lenses clogged with sand. The atmosphere felt almost festive, the air humming with invisible balloons. “Bernie tell me you go with me to Baghdad, no? This is good. This is what I am talking about.”

I nearly laughed. “Renzo, first of all, I told Bernie I’d think about it. Not that I’d definitely come. Second of all, you may be surprised to hear this . . .”—I dropped to a sotto voce—“. . . but not everyone would define ‘real life’ as choosing to work in constant proximity to death.”

“Yes, but they would be wrong,” he whispered, loudly, back. “Just one ticket is fine,” said Renzo, grabbing my backpack off my shoulder and handing it to the Hasid along with his own. As if we hadn’t just spent the past decade apart, living our separate lives. Carrying separate backpacks.

“Maybe,” I said. “But most people are just happier, I guess, not thinking about it all the time. Or seeing it up close. All the time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.