Between Brooklyn and Manhattan, miles across the water, we saw the final curtain of New York City—the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. It spanned the opening to the port, a steel-blue pair of upper lips greeting the blackness.
I could do anything anywhere, in all four directions.
“Craig?” Aaron was like.
“What’s up.”
“What’s up with you? You okay?”
“I’m happy,” I said.
“Why not?”
“No, I said I’m happy.”
“I know. Why not be?”
We came up to the first tower of the bridge, with a plaque proclaiming who had built it; I stopped to read. John Roebling. Aided by his wife, and then his son. He died during construction. But hey, the Brooklyn Bridge might be here for eight hundred years. I wanted to leave something like that behind. I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I felt like I had taken the first steps.
“The really cool thing about Nia . . .” Aaron was saying, and he started to go into anatomical details, things about her that I didn’t need to hear; I tuned him out; I knew he was talking to himself. This was what he was happy about. I was happy about different stuff. I was happy because someday I’d be walking across this bridge looking at this city, owning some piece of it, being valuable here.
“Her butt is like—I think her butt shape is where they got the heart logo. . . .”
We came to the middle of the bridge. On either side of us the cars hissed past; red on the left and white on the right, the lanes encased by thin metal trussing that stretched out from the walkway.
I had a sudden urge to walk out over the trussing and lean over the water, to declare myself to the world. Once it came into my head, I couldn’t push it away.
“I don’t know if it was real—” Aaron was saying.
“I want to stand out over the water,” I told him.
“What?”
“Come with me. You want to do it?”
He stopped.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I see where you’re coming from.”
There were pathways built onto the top of the trussing, places for the bridge workers to get out to the cables and repair them. I clambered onto one on the harbor side, the side crowned by the Verrazano, and grabbed the handrails and balanced my feet one in front of the other on a piece of metal about four inches wide. Below me cabs and SUVs hummed by. In front of me was the black of the water and the black of the sky and the cold.
“You’re crazy,” Aaron said.
I took steps forward. It was easy. Stuff like this always is. The stuff adults tell you not to do is the easiest.
Below me there were three lanes of traffic; I cleared the first, got halfway over the second; then Aaron yelled:
“What are you going to do out there?!”
“I’m just going to think!” I called back.
“About what?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t explain. “It’ll only take a minute!”
Aaron turned back.
I moved past the second lane and kept my eyes on the horizon. I didn’t move my eyes from it for the last lane, shifting my hands in front of one another in a tight rhythm. I came to the edge of the bridge and was sort of surprised how there wasn’t any fence. There wasn’t anything to keep you from falling off, just your hands and your will. I gripped the bars at either side—they were freezing—and then sprung my hands open and spread my arms wide and felt the wind whip and tug at me as I leaned myself over the water like . . . well, like Christ, I guess.
I closed my eyes and opened them, and the only difference was the feel of the wind on my eyeballs, because when I closed them I could still see the dotted lights perfectly. I threw back my head and yelled. When I was a kid I read these books, the Redwall books, fantasy books about a bunch of warrior mice, and the mice had this war cry that I always thought was cooclass="underline" “Eulalia.”
And like an idiot, that’s what I yelled off the Brooklyn Bridge:
Eulaliaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
And I could have died right then.
And considering how things went, I really should have.
eleven
Depression starts slow. After howling off the Brooklyn Bridge, I walked home and felt great. Aaron split and took a late-night subway back to Manhattan, where he had a hell of a time cleaning up his apartment and returning Nia to her parents; I went to a diner and got some eggs and wheat toast and came home at ten in the morning, telling Mom I had slept over at Aaron’s, and pouring myself into bed. When I got up in the afternoon there were some forms to sign about accepting my admission to Executive Pre-Professional and a physical to schedule—how glorious. For once I was looking forward to the doctor holding my balls and telling me to cough, which I still don’t understand why they do.
The rest of junior high was a joke. I didn’t need to do anything except make sure I didn’t fail a class and get “rescinded” from Executive Pre-Professional, so I started hanging out with Aaron every day. Now that we had the pot barrier broken, it became a magnificent haze of yelling back at the TV; we stopped calling it “watching movies”; we started calling it “chilling.”
“Want to chill?” Aaron would ask, and I would pop on over.
Ronny was never far behind. His insults never stopped, although they became more lovable, but that didn’t matter, because he grew into a reliable dealer. He wasn’t going to high school with us—for all we knew, he wasn’t going at all—but he was going to set up a jewelry shop, sell drugs, and make beats, that was for sure.
Nia was always around, too. She and Aaron spent about as much time apart as me and my right hand. I thought I was cool with it, but as I saw them—sitting with each other, sitting on each other, hugging each other, touching each other’s butt, smiling and kissing, in Aaron’s room or in public—I started to get more and more pissed off. It was like they were throwing it in my face, although I knew neither of them meant that, the way I had thrown my studying in people’s faces and not meant it. Why else would they tell each other how much they wanted each other in whispers in front of me? Why else would Aaron tell me, in great detail, about the first time they had sex? One day Aaron announced to me and Ronny as we watched MTV, “You know what, since I got with Nia, I’ve forgotten how to masturbate.”
“Me too, since I found your mom,” Ronny said.
“Huh,” I said. My stomach hitched.
“I’m serious, I don’t even know, anymore!” Aaron grinned.
Great, man. Wonderful. I learned how to masturbate the last few months of junior high, when I went on AOL and started talking to girls with names like “Little Luscious Lolita 42.” I don’t know if they were really girls. I just knew that I was lonely, and I wanted to make it so that when I got with someone, I’d have some idea what to do.
Problem was, no matter what girl I was talking to online, when I came to the end of the whole process, I would run to the bathroom. And as I knelt down in front of the toilet, in the final few milliseconds, I would think about Nia.
I had homework for school even before school started. They gave me this insane reading list for the summer that included Under the Volcano and David Copperfield. I tried to read them; I really did, but it wasn’t like flash cards. It took days. Mom actually read the letters that the school sent and told me that part of their mission was to make us well-rounded, liberally educated bearers of tomorrow’s vision, so I had better be ready to do English as well as math; but I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were? I would much rather chill at Aaron’s, sit in my room, run to the Internet and then to the bathroom, rinse, cycle, repeat. I ended up not finishing any of the summer-reading-list books.