*6*

After coffee, Bob put down the newspaper and stood to stretch his legs. His life seemed to be reverting to "normal" now, if there ever was such a thing as "normal" for him. After he and Debra concluded that things weren't going to work out, the freezing winter, a spring break by himself, finally a humid summer cleared his thoughts so he could start anew. Now in Autumn again, he was back engrossed in his learning, the comfort of the routine occasionally allowing him the freedom to engage the full power of his psychics.

The newspaper left him bored. Student protests in Taiwan, reports of illegal campaign contributions to the governor, difficulty cleaning an upstate toxic dump site, the Sox two games above .500. Nothing that really personally affected him - just irrelevant tidbits that strangers could safely discuss without touching souls ... the common flotsam of a bored society.

Would it rain tomorrow? The weather was practical information: something that could affect what he might possibly do. The obituaries were a solid touch of reality. Mostly other peoples realities, of course. Once, however, he read about the death of a dear friend's grandmother. When he read it, he expanded his love to comfort his friend. Several weeks later he consoled her with a visit to see how she was doing. But the rest of the paper was as worthless and pointless as the advertising.

Bob had nothing to do. It felt like the seventh-inning stretch in an eight-to-nothing ball game. He walked into his room, sat on the edge of his bed, and gazed around the room. Stuff. Nothing particularly fetching. Nothing to move, no particular urge to create. Bob stretched. A walk would be nice. A trolley ride, and then a walk.

He walked over to the bay window and gazed upon a resplendent day: clear with an occasional gust of cool breeze, the leaves at their peak of color, the sky so blue as to almost fluoresce. A great day for a walk. Bob went back into his room, grabbed his wallet, keys and windbreaker, and headed out.

He deeply inhaled the air from a magnificent autumn day, his eyes perused the few scattered clouds in the sky. Bob wasn't sure where he was destined, but it would be pleasant to explore downtown; something was drawing him into town (the buildings? the red light district?). He walked toward the trolley tracks, animated by the fresh air.

Bob stood by the tracks, waiting for the trolley. He looked down the tracks, the rickety rails with wearing cross-ties, oil-soaked dirty gravel. The steel rails converging into the distance. The vernal atmosphere, crisp and clean, wafted past him, Bob's eyes scanning the crimson-turning leaves. The redolent smell of cooking with a hint of ocean breeze tingled his nose. And here he was. His gaze settled across the street upon a small community movie theater, its marquee with plastic letter titles of the two films. Return of the Jedi. The "J" in Jedi was actually something else: someone had taken an "L" and flipped it backwards. Not many J's in the letter bin. So here he was.

Bob felt a most peculiar and profound déjà vu, combined with a powerful self-connectivity to his future. What was strange was, well, he was just standing there, waiting for a trolley, eternally connected to all his future thoughts and particular love points of his past.

Below the bend in the main road, the tracks headed flat and straight toward downtown. In the distance, the downtown skyscrapers rose, interspersed, like a small self-contained prickly steel and glass anemone. Light and shadows played across the spires and windows, a glint of patterned gradations.

With his eye moving from the distant city back up the tracks, he glanced at the nearby storefronts and college-student apartments. Inside the apartments he spied books, glass bottles, sheaves of paper. Following the tracks in the other direction, after the bend: uphill, mild curves, suburbs. And he stood here too, connected to his standing two years earlier in front of the community movie theater -- to all his past thoughts and particular love points of his future.

In the distance, Bob espied the trolley approaching. Cars whizzed by, pedestrians on the sidewalk. A young man quickly crossed the street and stopped beside Bob, waiting for the streetcar. The trolley lingered at a red signal, a block away. Bob reached into his pocket for some change and a dollar bill from his wallet. He looked around to the buildings across the street and behind him: nothing special. The trolley pulled up beside them... its door opened. Bob stepped up and in first, the other man following.

Bob sat in an empty bench around three-quarters of the way back. The trolley was maybe a fifth full. Inside, the quiet spring air, barely sparkling, floated dust about passengers in a late morning daze. Outside, the small shops and apartments lazily passed by, the trolley gently rolling side to side. Bob's mind drifted.

Sometimes he felt he was just along for the ride. A mind inside a body, the body with an agenda of its own - eat, pee, sex. Or driven by some primitive non-corporeal need, a requirement for love, the brain a passenger in a body, itself chained to the inevitable pull of his soul. Where was he headed, and why? All he knew was that he was just going with the flow. The flow told him it was time to debark. He stood, pulled the bell-cord: ding, let me off at the next stop please.

Back outside, the nearly perfect weather felt slightly cool: cool enough to make his arm hairs goosebump slightly, but still gentle enough to avoid a sweater. Bob walked along the sidewalk. The regular horizontal seams exclaimed darkness against the salt-stained whiteness of the concrete. Baby blades of grass were dawning between the sidewalk and the street, in the soil still moist from the last rain. It was as if a small child had just spotted, in the distance, the FAO Schwartz toy store in the mall. The child could see the bright colors and recognize the familiar marketing tug ... no turning back now, Spring was going to burst on through.

Two clouds dotted the sky. They were evaporating slowly, becoming smaller, soon to disappear. Bob sensed the slightest sensation of smell from his inhale. The air had lost its moistness from the rain, its earthiness, and was a soft blend between the emerging softness of the city on a Sunday morning, sausage five blocks away, and Nature on the threshold of Spring.

Up ahead Bob saw a park -- a perfect rectangle, bordered in the back by some houses and the street on three sides. A waist-high wrought-iron fence parceled off the property, more in temper than physically. Although the fence kept the city outside and the park inside, it also spiritually separated the atmosphere. Outside the fence, cars and people passed in a hustle and bustle, adults anxious to work. Inside, kids, Frisbee, play. Cherry trees encircled the park, all the same height, naked, but covered with buds, all together anticipating the full oblation of spring.

Shrubbery, several years of growth, climbed and nearly three-quarters covered the wrought iron fence. Although he was still a block or so away, Bob could see beyond the fence to the playyard, a mish-mash of older and newer equipment. Swings, an old merry-go round, modern green plastic climbing bars, an old teeter-totter. Three of the neighborhood kids were scaling the bars, a couple other kids glided past on small two-wheel bikes, one with training wheels. Bob walked up and entered through a break in the fence.

He walked over to the swings and sat down. The metal triangle holding the chain pressed into the sides of his buttocks. Hmmm, a little too big for swings. He felt some wetness on his rear, stood up, turning around to check. Hmm, yes, a spot of wetness, and he noticed, flipping over the swing, it had gathered some water underneath, still from yesterday's rain. He gave the plastic seat a shake, water drops fell to the sand. He sat back down.

Bob pushed himself back with his feet, straightening his legs. He lifted his feet off the ground and swung forward. On the backswing he had to separate his calves and feet to the sides, to avoid dragging his feet on the ground. The passing shoes of countless pendular children had dug trenches under the swing. Even so, Bob's length interfered with his free motion. He experimented on the backswings, testing ways to avoid hitting his heels at the bottom. Holding his legs out straight on the backswing, or butterflying them to the sides, somewhat awkward, splayed like a young calf struggling to rise. He gave several more pumps.

With his strength and size, it took about a dozen pumps to hit full swing. Umm, this was probably high enough. The chains briefly slackened at the top of each swing; and pinched his hands as they tightened on the downswing. At the top of each swing he felt a "clunk": a little bump, a warning. The tops of the chains gave a mild creak with each swing. Probably not used to carrying the weight of a grownup.

A small boy approached the swings and gave Bob a peek from the corner of his eye. His thoughts were man, this guy is pretty weird. What does he think he is, a kid or something? The small boy got on the swing at the far end of the set, giving a little jump hop to get up into the seat. He glanced at Bob again from the corner of his eye and smirked to himself. Once seated, his feet dangled about six inches from the ground. He began pulling and stretching, pushing and pumping. It wasn't long until his head was higher on the backswing than Bob's. The small boy smiled to himself, mindful to avoid looking at Bob.

After a few minutes, Bob began to feel foolish and rueful. He recalled how much he had loved to swing as a child, and glumly let the swing pendulum naturally back and forth, diminishing, until the arc slowed to only two feet from front to back. He gently got off and walked out of the park, leaving his moppet ghost to swing with the other young kid. He would head back to the subway.