Playworld

by Adam Ross

I looked up toward Hornbeam’s second-story window, at the room where we’d sat, and I paused. From this angle, I could spy only the chandelier. The space seemed to shine with a unique vividness, a deep focus, one I would recognize in later years as I walked through other luxurious neighborhoods in distant cities, knowing full well how remarkable they were inside.

What he needed was love and tending to, someone to tell him a story that ended with a rosy future beyond the holes out of which he was trying to dig himself.

When I urged him to come with the family to the burial, he simply said, “I need to be alone.” Then he turned and hurried downtown, fleeing us because he didn’t trust us, which was, since he was a boy, what he’d wanted to be able to do most of all.

We entered the park at the Engineers’ Gate on Ninetieth. There was, I noticed for the first time, a memorial at the base of the stairs leading up to the reservoir’s cinder track, a man’s bust, and I made a mental note, the next time I passed it, to study its plaque. You could never exhaust the totality of this city any more than you could the knowledge of another person, or yourself.

you can take two people, place them within shouting distance of each other, set them on their way, and in their lifetimes, they might never cross paths again. Even if it became their most fervent wish, having been separated, they could no more find the other among its infinite paths or spy the other reflected in its countless windows than an invisible man could find an invisible woman in an invisible city.