Block by block, the landscape begins to shift around him. Stunted patches of grass fight their way through gaps in the sidewalk. How long has he been walking? An hour? He’s lost track already. Has the school already noticed his absence, have they notified his father? Up, up, up. The drizzle slows, then stops. Supermarkets with giant glossy billboards of pizza, intricately ruffled kale, slices of mango that make his mouth water. His stomach growls, but he doesn’t stop: he has no money left anyway. Bodegas with tumbling mountains of fruit and buckets of sheathed roses and indifferent, yawning cats stretched across the displays; barbershops where men’s laughter floats through the propped-open doors on a wave of aftershave. In their windows, familiar posters: proud to be american. we watch over each other. Now there are trees, small wispy ones barely above a man’s head, but trees, nonetheless. Somewhere a church bell strikes. Three o’clock, or four? The street buzzes with life, and he can’t tell chimes from echoes. He should be walking home from school, but instead he is here, his pulse growing faster with each block. Nearly there.
He walks faster and around him the city changes faster, too, like a sped-up video zipping into the future, or possibly the past. The way things used to be, that golden pre-Crisis world he’s only heard about. More taxis, nicer ones, newer. Cleaner, as if they’ve just been washed. The streetlights are shiny black here, taller, sleeker, as if here there is more space to hold their heads high. He passes buildings with crowns of decorative stonework over each window: someone took the trouble, up here, to pick out details in beige against the red, just so that they would be beautiful. Now there are stores with wide glass windows, unafraid of being smashed. Restaurants with awnings. People walking small dogs; trees ringed by neat metal fences no taller than his knee: for show, not for protection.
As the mist clears, he spots patches of green high in the air: rooftop gardens, the peaks of potted evergreens pointing at the sky. The buildings and businesses are no longer trying to hide. yes we are open. Flashy, catchy, quirky names, trying to stand out, trying to catch your attention and stick in your mind: The Salty Squid. Sound Oasis. Chickenosity. His father would have laughed. In each window, the familiar star-spangled placard. Banners advertising the fanciness of what they had, not its cheapness. Higher and higher the cross streets climb, as if he is scaling a ladder: Fiftieth, Fifty-Fifth, Fifty-Sixth. Men in suits. Men with ties. Men in leather shoes with fringed tassels and smooth soles in which you had no need to run. Long ago his father had worn shoes like that. Banks, so many banks—three, four, five in a row, sometimes the same bank on both sides of the street, one across from the other. He had not known it was possible to be so rich you would not cross the street.
A department store the length of an entire block, all sleek dark granite polished to mirror gloss. As if to say: in this place, even stones shine like stars. In its windows, faceless mannequins wear floral silk scarves around their throats. Tall apartment buildings, each window a pocket of reflected sky set into the walls like a gem. He imagines his mother living in one of them, looking down on him, waiting for him. Soon he’ll know. Refrigerated trucks idle by the curbs, crammed with grocery deliveries, huffing their frosted breath into the air. Now there are coffee shops, places meant to linger in. Billboards for whitening and straightening teeth; hotels with suited bellhops in hats poised just outside. Here, people hold bags not meant to carry, but to be pretty. Dry cleaner after dry cleaner: a neighborhood of silk, too delicate to wash. At each door, burly men from the neighborhood watch stand guard.
Seventy-Fifth Street. Seventy-Sixth. Older buildings that wore their age gracefully, looking staid, not shabby. Here foreign words are proudly displayed: Salumeria. Vineria. Macarons. A safe and desirable foreignness. Shops labeled gourmet and luxury and vintage. Here—and it does not seem possible that this is the same street he’s followed from those painted-over signs and fearful whispers; it must be another world he’s journeyed into—the street is wide and lined with trees. He likes the thought of his mother here, in this beautiful place. Blond women in jogging tights puff beside him, ponytails bobbing, as they wait for the signal to change. Nannies push sleek strollers, the babies inside sumptuously dressed. He passes stores that make only picture frames, restaurants that serve only salad, shops selling pink shirts embroidered with tiny, smiling whales. Buildings so tall their tips are invisible, even when he cranes his head so far he nearly falls backward. Anything could happen here, everything does happen here. It is like fairyland, or a fairy tale.
This is the place, he thinks. This is where she is.
And because this is a magical fairyland, where anything can happen, because he is so invigorated by all that he’s seen, still swooning on the rich air of possibility inflating his lungs, he isn’t surprised when suddenly, there she is: his mother, just across the street. A small brown dog at her side. Something inside him leaps skyward in a shower of sparks, and he almost cries out in joy.
Then his mother glances down at the dog, which is nosing in a manicured flower bed, and it is not his mother at all. Just a woman. Who doesn’t resemble her at all, actually; only in the most superficial ways—an East Asian woman with long black hair, carelessly pulled back in a knot. The face, now that he can see her more clearly, is nothing like his mother’s. His mother would never have such a dog, this little amber powder puff like a teddy bear with black-button eyes, a pert velvet nose. Of course it isn’t her, he chides himself, how could it be. And yet there is something about the way she holds herself—the alertness of her posture, the quickness of her eyes—that reminds him of her.
The woman notices him across the street, watching her, and smiles. Perhaps he reminds her of someone, too; perhaps at first glance she mistook him for someone she loves and now that love spills over to him, a largesse. And because she is looking at him, because she is smiling at him and perhaps thinking fond thoughts about this little boy who reminds her of someone she loves, she does not see it coming: a fist, smashing into her face.
It happens in seconds but it seems to stretch on forever. Out of nowhere. A tall white man. The woman crumpling, turned to rubble. Bird’s own body petrified, his scream cemented in his throat. The man towering over her, kick, kick, kick, soft sickening thumps like a mallet on meat: her belly, her chest, and then—as she curls up like a shelled shrimp, arms over face, trying to protect what she can—the curve of her back. Her cries wordless sounds, hanging in the air like shards of glass. The man himself says nothing, as if he is doing a job, something impersonal but necessary.
No one comes to help. An older couple about-faces, as if they’ve remembered something urgent elsewhere. A man hurries away, bent over his phone; cars flow by, unperturbed. They must see, Bird thinks, how can they not? The dog, ankle high, barks and barks. A doorman emerges from the building behind and Bird nearly sobs with gratitude. Help, he thinks. Help her. Please. Then the doorman pulls the door shut. Bird can faintly make him out on the other side of the thick plate glass, blurred and ghostly, watching as if it were a scene on a TV screen: the woman’s cheek against the sidewalk now, the jolt of her body with each blow. Waiting for it to be done so that he can open the door once more.
The woman has stopped moving and the man looks down at her—with disgust? With satisfaction? Bird can’t tell. The dog is still snarling and barking, furious and impotent, its small feet scuffling the pavement. With a swift movement the man brings his boot down, hard, on its back. The way he might crush a soda can, or a cockroach.
Bird screams then, and the man turns and spots Bird watching him, and Bird runs.
Blindly, as fast as he can. Not daring to look behind him. Bookbag hammering against him like a drumbeat. Sweat-soaked shirt hot then cold at the small of his back. Is she dead, he thinks, is the dog dead. Did it matter. The man’s eyes still drill at the nape of his neck and his stomach heaves and he retches, but nothing comes out. He darts down an alleyway and huddles behind a dumpster, catching his breath, the back of his throat raw and burning.