The Rags of Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

to the young lieutenant “like science fiction. There were all these legends everywhere.”
    Here’s a true story you might recall if you’re getting on in years: This Is Your Life, a popular show, bottom of the TV barrel, in which the unsuspecting party is brought onstage and confronted with someone long lost who “made all the difference.” A programmed occasion for faked embarrassment, tears of joy, shrieks of disbelief: Oh, my God! Which is exactly what the pilot and bombardier of Enola Gay, the plane of infamy that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, cried out, Oh, my God! upon viewing the shadowy forms of two Keloid Girls hidden behind translucent screens, lest the audience of 40 million be disturbed by their Bar numesque disfigurement. The pilot died this past year, ever sure of his mission. Well, that’s the story folks, entertainment trumping science fiction.
    I managed to make my way huffing, puffing to midpoint in the eastern stretch of the Track. Windows high above Fifth Avenue flashed the bronze setting of the sun. I will never understand how that brilliant display, mostly blocked by the apartment houses on Central Park West, leaps the Reservoir’s expanse. And do not care to understand, demanding magic from this forbidden journey, though the simple refraction of light at end of day may be grammar-school science. Breath coming short, halfway home, no use turning back. Feeling my considerable age, I settled into a simple touch of the blues. Not a jogger in sight, as though an official blew the whistle—ending play. Loping on, heart racing ahead, I was alone on the loop that leads to the North Gate House, thinking the tennis courts would soon come into view, might still be open at dusk with the plunk-plunk of balls and the mercy of a public drinking fountain. But there, under the flickering cover of trees, were two figures, still as statues until they heard the slow shuffle of my feet, then the woman put out her hand. With a swift gesture demanded I stop.
    Perched above—an owl. In the lens of his unblinking golden eyes, the bird possessed us.
    The quiet, spooky at first, was then pleasantly prolonged, the owl joining our conspiracy of silence. The woman’s attention consumed her. The man lowered his binoculars to feast on his wife’s pure pleasure as she wrote in a little book. I presume wife. Now I place gold rings on the birdwatchers’ fingers. Matched beyond their Nike jackets and billed caps, they became one in their attention to the bird. It’s only now I frame them as young lovers in a chill season, intent on their pursuit of nature; not shepherd and milkmaid tumbling in the hay, stockings in telltale disarray. I presume they are blessed with each other beyond this bucolic scene. Or not blessed, for he withdrew a few steps, looked somewhat paternal, admiring the quick strokes of her drawing, the ardor of her attention. For a moment he took me in—disheveled old lady with no claim to bird lore—then flashed me a smile as if to say, We’re not among the converted .
    His wife would know, without benefit of my Audubon Guide, the long-eared owl to be ubiquitous in the Northeast. She drew us to our observation again. A sudden movement in the undergrowth broke the spell. We waited, we three, for something tremendous, the owl’s dive for its victim, a chipmunk or Reservoir rat. The bird would not perform. Then, in that still, suspended time, thump-de-thump declared itself, the heavy off beat of my heart. Random, the turbulence does not follow fast moves or exertion, drops in like a petulant neighbor with its complaint. I waited for the fibrillation to tap its way back to something like normal. When I skipped off from our hushed encounter as best I could, then turned back, the birdwatchers had also left the scene. The flat Track seemed uphill all the way, the North Gate House much farther than recalled. As it finally came into view, I heard a creature’s high screech of death, and the owl’s cruel