Night Soul and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

I?—before a guy in a windbreaker saw me down the street and spoke into his phone as the street door popped open like a lid and a man I felt I should know broke free of another and another and the cop phoning moved to intercept him like a strong safety between him and the goal line.
    What is my job? To see what a child is seeing.
    Ali—I thought of him, if I could save him, but from what? And there he is in the doorway when his uncle—for how did I know it was that irritable, nephew-loving atlas of learning long-legged, a fugitive back home where life at noon like mission accomplished might cost nothing to cancel—swerving off the cement path toward a lone forsythia bush fell headlong tripped up it seemed by a pistol shot’s synchrony and slow-legged into silence as natural as anything?
     
     
    Police officer killed in line of duty, a news photo of him posted near the B and Q trains, near Ali’s apartment house, near the bus stop. Ali took the bus home.
     
     
    I waited at the game store.
     
     
    Once he said, “What do you advertise, Mister Mo?”
    MasterCard Glueguns, Digestive Bombs, little yellow plastic teardrop containers of lemon juice. A driving school concern with agencies in Jersey and Maryland.
     
     
    Asked about his home-study Qur’an, “Jesus didn’t have a father,” Ali replied as if I had asked. Would I have saved him from running to his uncle? From his mother’s scream? From looking up from his uncle shot down to see me near and have to decide what to do even about me? Which was nothing but to ignore me, his friend who doubted Abbod was a good half-brother. When neither the officer who shot his uncle, nor the other with him, nor the plainclothes with the cell, tried to question me.
     
     
    Abbod had ID in case he had to show it but never had to until he volunteered it at the driving school and was given training even before they checked him out.
     
     
    Routinely suspect, these people work almost as hard as our Koreans.
    “Faquir” (?) a poor person. I waited at the game store.
     
     
    I had known this neighborhood as a child, a grandchild. Things you know, all over the place. I told you I wanted a poet, she replies, meaning me.
     
     
    Who were these nomads? These Scythians and other ancient minds. A dual-control driver training car found parked in Astoria sniffed stem to stern by a police dog, a half-empty red Classic Coke can in back with a half-smoked cigarillo awash in it, but certain grains of unburnt powder evidently cleaned from nook and cranny of firearm with compressed-air spray gun commonly used to clean computer keyboards.
     
     
    Rendezvous though with a wife who likes the things you know and half-know (mostly half)—the ocean weathers, the laughter of Herodotus at map makers who would make Ocean a river running round a circular earth—yet his praise for Solon’s rule that every man once a year should declare the source of his livelihood at risk of death if he can’t prove the source an honest one.
     
     
    Winds across the water, which hardly gives way…the Narrows…the Verrazano…My head adrift with bridges, we dream along a reach to converge far out at sea where on station a Coast Guard weather ship will plunge onward in a twelve-mile-by-twelve-mile square…
     
     
    To go from thing to thing, not too afraid—knowing truth has a better chance to trespass sudden and interrupting…
     
     
    The Bridge in pieces and angles of itself—adrift like our seasons.
     
     
    “Mister Mo.”
     
     
    Mo thinks of what it is his wife wants. To travel. More than anything. She pores over a map of Asia. We make decisions together, don’t we? What is a map? I think I actually asked her. We’re still young, she not yet thirty-seven. (Home-schooled in California, when she grew up she had understandably come east.)
     
     
    I must read only children’s books (Mandelstam writes),
    Cherish only children’s thoughts,
    Scatter all big things far and wide,
    Rise up from the