The Thousand Mile String As I walked, a taxi skidded past and threw up sludge at me from the side of the road. I’d started to think things like that happened on purpose, probably owing to too much time spent with Raymond. All around in a Brooklyn symphony free of charge, taxis honked at the bicyclists cutting them off, and the bicyclists swore and proceeded to cut them off anyway. They all squirmed like beetles, niggling under my coat and scratching at my skin. Overhead, even the last birds stupid enough to stay in New York had had enough of the winter and flew southward. It was two o’clock on a Saturday in January and so I was going to see Raymond. I passed a girl and thought she was coughing into her leather glove, but then I remembered my hair and realized she was laughing. She had a laugh like Sofia did, back when we were girls and she’d laugh at my portraits. I drew them silly just for her, to make her smile. Now Sofia works somewhere in Sudan for Doctors Without Borders and when she gets some internet connection she always calls me. She tells me she’s lonely, always lonely. With some five thousand (she’s the math one, not I) miles between us, there’s nothing I can do but assure her that I am too, nothing I can do but be lonely with her. That’s something I seem to do a lot of, be lonely with other people. That’s what I was on my my way to do. Raymond was in the second pew from the back when I arrived in the church, turned around to face the door. I dipped two fingers in the bowl of water by the door and drew the obligatory cross upon myself: forehead, lips, chest. It doesn’t very much matter to me, as I stopped believing in God the day after my eleventh birthday when my pet rat got caught in the radiator. But I know it matters to Raymond, so I go through the ritual every time I come. “Your hair,” he called in his hoarse voice, graveling like a smoker’s but never having known a cigarette. His black and white collar pinched his solid neck, maybe his vocal cords as well. I fingered my dishwater green locks. “It’s not supposed to look this way.” Our voices echoed in the empty church as in a cave, the incense candles on chains hanging from the ceiling like stalactites. “I’m too old for it to be intentional. I went too cheap on the hair dye this time.” “On the Seventh Day, the Lord ruled against cheap cosmetics, Amelia.” Raymond tapped the frame of his bifocals, then waved me closer. “Come, I’ve saved a little room for you.” He slid over and I sat down in the pew next to him, breathing in the smell of the
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