Music had been promised between two and five and here we were two-ten and they were still tuning up and fucking around, some sitting on folding chairs in the street, 5th Ave revelers strolling by with their grilled corn and mozzarepas. I really didn’t mind. The plunks and blurps from their instruments faded nicely into the hubbub of the fair. I didn’t want the music to start.

The radio said there’d be violent storms, a tornado even. Watch out for flying branches. But instead it was beautiful, just a little cloudy. It got weirdly bright and silvery midafternoon and then big, fat drops of rain fell straight down like they were dripping from a sieve.

When you’re watching your team it doesn’t matter how good they are, they seem plagued to you, forever vulnerable, unlucky. Because you see yourself in them maybe. I was so sure they’d lose the penalty shootout I braced myself. Clenched my stomach against the inevitable sorrow. Then they had a chance to win, and missed. Now for sure it’s all over. How can it not be over? But they won.

In my slight abbreviation. Sorry, my slight inebriation tonight I remembered that S. said she wanted to watch a documentary about a famous comedian. I know his last name: Carlin. I’m pretty sure it’s Carlin. A very famous, legendary comedian. But I cannot now, and haven’t for some hours, been able to remember his first name. Bob? Joe. Jim?

Bill Carlin. Is it Bill? I’m pretty sure it’s Bill. It’s not Jeff, it’s not Tom. For sure not Tom.

We’re not even going to talk about Adam or Andy or anything like that. It’s a one-syllable name for sure. Of that I am sure. In fact there are very few male names that are not, or can’t be reduced to, a single syllable. Think about it.

It’s not Mike. It’s not Dave.

Bill. Bill Carlin?

A strange, quiet evening when dinner’s too early because Jackie was at the dentist and they brought back Shake Shack. Now golden sunlight streams across the space and birds are chirping and there’s nothing to do, not even a kid to put to bed.

On my morning run I thought of writing a play about the tragedy. Why not after all? As I turned around at the end of the park I thought of a cutely poignant little ending. Then I thought no. Now I’m not sure.

Sunday before last we had dinner in a covid enclosure on the street, a neighborhood Italian on Sixth Ave. We took our time, had dessert. Everyone so nice and friendly. I observed a shadowy figure pacing a living room on the second floor above the restaurant. A drizzle began to fall but not on us.

On our way back we passed another restaurant. Their street tables were bustling. The food looked good. We thought we’d like to try it sometime. Just past its perimeter, where cars again occupied the parking spots, there was something strange. You could feel it before you saw it. A nice SUV parked beneath a tree, dotted with fresh rain. The windshield was smashed in by a pipefitter’s wrench that remained nestled in the breach, radiating a web of cracks across the glass. It seemed staged, theatrical. Like there was a hidden camera capturing our reactions. A performance art installation, maybe. The wrench was just too perfect. Weighty, industrial. Everything else was just so pretty. The dusting of pink blossoms on the cars and street. The lamplit walls and stoops. We scrutinized the wrench for a minute. Peered at the front seat of the car, apparently unaffected. We thought of taking pictures but we didn’t.

I read the police report off my phone, glasses up on my head so I could get up close and see the print. Witness #1, Witness #2. The alleged perpetrator’s unlikely alias, Hugh. By one account he was Puerto Rican, by all the others Italian. White. Heavy-set. 5-11.

One passage described the blood as magma-like.

I peered away from time to time to watch a documentary about an extraordinarily successful singer from the nineties whose song may or may not have led to the suicide of the man who coined its title. She collapsed in tears in her interview on her rickety wooden chair.

He was described as having a widow’s peak. Upon his arrest out of state he had been using “some sort of cane.”

The perpetrator and one of the witnesses arrived at the victim’s house in the perpetrator’s thirty-year-old pickup truck. Something was broken and the victim and the perpetrator spent a few hours troubleshooting. Then they came back in the house together.

In the supermarket after the game. There’s no such thing as pretzel rods anymore. Ever since the pandemic. You can buy a bag of black truffle sea salt potato chips but no pretzel rods. I dropped a couple things trying to carry them away from the checkout counter and the guy ahead of me apologized profusely like it was him who knocked them out of my arms. Then the cashier offered me a bag and didn’t make me pay.

It was a quiet time at the bar. Just a few of us out back, a few inside. A man with long white hair and a goatee sat at the table in the corner of the yard, smoking a cigar that never seemed to get small. Not paying attention to the game. But there just the same.

The outside TV was way ahead of the inside TV. Twenty, maybe thirty seconds. Just crazy. There’d be a chance, we out there would cheer and groan, and like clockwork our exclamations were echoed half a minute into the future.

Perhaps for this reason people gravitated out. Some heavy hitters, shouters. They drew others out by their gravity. There was nowhere much to sit. I had my place at the picnic table, Andy opposite. Others were sitting all around us now, some crouching on the gravel. The mood was antic. Adam and Paul talking about the Irish in Liverpool like there’s no fucking game on, come on.

Then the equalizer. A deflection into the corner of the net. Howls of glee like the game was won, not tied. The scoreline didn’t change but neither did this undue jubilation. Buckets of icy cold Carlsberg appeared, like something someone ordered for a shitty party and left behind. I drank one, or almost one. Saleem from Lebanon sat down beside me and told me what it meant to him to be a fan. He couldn’t say exactly why it was important, he just knew that it was. He spoke around it, elliptically. I will remember this moment right now for the rest of my life, he declared. It’s a way of marking life. Punctuating. Of better remembering what’s not the game. There was a bombing near where he grew up on the day of the Champions League final and as soon as it was established that his mother was alive the TV went on. He keeps a football journal now, he said.

The owner of the bar came out back to turn up the TV volume after I’d already turned it up partway. I was sitting back on the table bench. He said something to me, gesturing.

“What?” I said.

He said it again, a little different.

“What?”

He said it again. I made out a couple words. “Up.” “Top.”

“What?” I said again like a total jackass moron.

“Didja turn it all the way up to the top?”

No I had not. So he did, and the volume was now loud and clear, reaching out across the graveled back patio and reverberating gently off the tin walls. There were some ads before the game began.

I thanked him and he made a joke and I thanked him again and he went inside.

Houses glimpsed from the highway through the trees.

I had something to write about yesterday, something to do with the weather. About how people went out and went to work in it, in spite of it. Something about they shuddered at the forbidding cold and rain, except it wasn’t that. I tried to remember and forgot.

I started the stopwatch on my phone for something over the weekend—timing the length of a work presentation. When I opened the clock today for something else I was startled to find it still running, 39 hours 26 minutes and something something seconds, tenths and hundredths flashing by. It was eerie to observe the stupid machine going on like this, devoid of human attention and oblivious to it, too. It could run for a million hours, it doesn’t care. A hundred million hours. Long after life on earth has been eclipsed and our sun has collapsed into a singularity the machine will be counting the hours. Long after time does not exist, the machine will be counting the hours.

I peered up at the sky from the sidewalk table on Fifth. The white expanse was screened by leafless branches, budding in the early spring. I remembered lying on the couch with an ear infection circa 1975. The pain shot through my skull. I tried to kill time by tracing sinuous lines around the bare branches in the picture window; they were a maze, a problem to be solved. I saw a Facebook post of a newspaper photo from 1976 of seven or eight kids from my high school, musicians. Due to the composition those in the front row had to kneel, hands behind their backs. Their posture was deeply familiar to me, triggering a peculiar emotion. It occurred to me this is how terrorists present their captives to video cameras before beheading them.

Day 8

While up in the parasail I observed to Jackie that it almost looked like you could see the curvature of the earth. It was a dumb remark but we were up high, higher than I’d noticed on previous rides. We approached a tiny island with a boat moored nearby. There was no one on its patch of beach. In the distance were the curving white shapes of resorts, Sandals, Hedonism II. I was aghast at how easy it might be to unhook myself from the harness. Or maybe it wasn’t easy. Perhaps safety features were in place, an autolocking mechanism. I didn’t try to find out. It was better to look down.

Day 7

I must have lost consciousness for twenty seconds or so on that floatie. I found myself on the other side of the roped-off area. In the neighboring zone, with its different swimmers and different beach. I propelled myself back with my hands. The sky looked the same.

In a land far away they’re lining up for rifles to shoot at the rampaging invaders from the East.

They’re playing The Song now, I’ve heard it twice. Everything goes to hell eventually.

Day 6

There was a dragonfly in the pool, up against the wall. We weren’t sure it was alive. I scooped it out a bit carelessly and now it lay in the spilled water at poolside, wings tangled and bent. But it moved. Three of its four wings were stuck together on one side. I figured fixing this was essential to the thing’s flight and so to its survival. I was able to pry them apart painstakingly, like layers of wet tissue paper. They were separate now but still heavy with water. The bug moved and even flinched its wings but seemed stunned, uncertain.

We automatically ascribe human qualities to animals of course, especially qualities of thought. It seemed certain to me that this creature was narratizing its ordeal to itself as we might: Fuck. How the fuck am I wet? How am I going to fly now? Am I dying? Is this it?

The thing suddenly hopped an inch or two and took flight. Right back into the pool. I took it out again and placed back it on the tile. Its wings were fucked up again but even worse. They were rolled up and bent, rolled up pin-shaped, bent like rabbit ears. I went and tore off a corner of my bookmark and used it to try to work them back into shape. They were impossibly delicate—I couldn’t believe they didn’t tear. From time to time its legs moved. Not dead yet. It kind of worked but the wings were still crumpled and misshapen.

Now I wondered if that was my fault. I’d swooped in pretending to be a savior, my daughter watching. Yes, I’d be the miracle man who’d restore flight to a doomed and stricken insect—its insignificance didn’t matter; in fact it made the endeavor all the more poignant.

There was something else my new friend might be saying: Fuck this asshole! What the fuck does he think he’s doing? Does he think he’s fucking helping me? Keep your fingers off me, fuckface. I’m trying to take care of myself here. To dry off a goddamn minute and fly. Away from you.

Yes, I was certain my interference had done more harm than good. Other than removing it from the pool, I should have left it alone. This is an evolved bug. Its wings can right themselves. It knows how to get back on its feet and in the air. It’s such human vanity to imagine we’re helping. To think our petty meddling actions are essential all the goddamn time. 

I swam away for a minute, disconsolate. When I looked again the thing was on its back, legs wriggling. I turned it over. Still seemed fucked up. But alive. I gave up now. It was never going to fly with those fucked wings a thoughtless human being had manipulated. Again I swam away, thinking fuck it.

But then I did come round to have a final look. It was gone.

Day 5

Back on the beach again, It’s Five O’clock Somewhere and Cheeseburgers in Paradise. It’s interesting that I haven’t yet heard The Song played a single time. And the volume seems to have gone down. Might there have been some sort of emergency arbitration between Margaritaville and the nearby businesses that resulted in a series of edicts? 

Out beyond the buoys Captain Moses’ One Love bobs softly with the Giant Bubba in tow, awaiting a clutch of drunken, sunburned tourists to rake across the waves.

Day 4

I dove down to touch the canon and tried to appreciate something of its antiquity. It really just felt hard under a veneer of moss. Like an old stone wall in the Connecticut woods. The anchor veiled in seaweed looked like a crucifix someone had escaped and discarded. And yet the fish and the coral and everything else is alive.

On the way out some others on the boat, maybe Eastern European, Russian, asked if it was okay to smoke. Nods all around. A mother and son pulling from the same pack. He lit up right after he got out of the water, too. Cigarettes as a means to delineate events.

It had rained pretty hard in the afternoon.The flagstone terrace of Rick’s ran with rivulets of dirty water that amassed in little pools. We watched the cliff jumpers, saw the sun set through the remains of the storm. The DJ played loud, punctuating the music with birthday shout-outs. Goddamn if it isn’t always someone’s birthday. A young couple, well-dressed, sat facing each other romantically at the corner of the bar. They were daintily eating dishes of penne pasta, one marinara, one cream. She lifted her phone and gazed into it as though it were a mirror.

Day 3

I should avoid all news while here, let it be an intriguing, unpleasant surprise upon our return, the aftermath of a brutal invasion depicted on the array of CNN screens at JFK immigration. But instead I’ve been compulsively checking the Times and the Post.

We went to the mini mart this morning and there were stacks of Red Stripe cases, so now there will be two eras of this vacation: the bottle and the can.

An older guy on the beach came up to me pulling a baggie out of his pocket. What do you need mon, that rap, and I said yeah but I don’t want to spend much, what can I get for ten. He wanted to sell me two for thirty, two for twenty-five. I said twenty, he said fine. A light rain began to fall and he led me to a covered space nearby. He ground a bud into a paper and made small talk, where you from, who you with. At the mention of the word wife he said it’ll make you real hard mon and I said you don’t need to tell me that and he laughed but what I really meant was, you don’t need to tell me that. You don’t have to sell this shit. It’s fucking marijuana. It sells itself.

I rejoined my family buying trinkets from a woman displaying her wares from a scarf in the sand.

Day 2

In one of my last dreams of the night I had a strong feeling it was 1:07 in the afternoon and I felt the requisite guilt of oversleeping, wasting half the day. When I awoke and asked Sara the time it was seven something. I lay in bed awhile trying to remember. 

A jogger ran past on the beach, winding up and delivering in a cricket bowler’s motion every ten paces or so.

Supply chain disruptions have made odd things scarce. At the supermarket there was no beer in cans. No plain Red Stripe, only apple, melon. Someone told us we’re lucky, they couldn’t find chlorine for the pool until a couple days ago. I lie back under the sun drinking Guinness Foreign Extra, twice the usual ABV. I guess the Irish can’t handle it.

I got up out of the hammock to watch the sunset and caught the three seconds when it goes from a sliver to nothing. 

I finished my short book about the end of the world. 

Day 1

I marveled at the blue sky, mouth agape like an idiot. Two birds thrashed in a nearby palm. Were they special birds, I wondered? Special Jamaica birds you don’t see back home. Are they somehow aware of their own identity as such, their splendor? I watched them dart around the fronds. Just a couple of birds.

I decided to roll off the floatie face down as though someone were trying to dispose of my corpse. To cast me adrift hoping I’d never wash ashore. I fell gently below the surface.

At poolside I took pains not to drip on my book. I lay on the chaise and read and drifted off to sleep and read again. At one point I remained conscious just long enough to read two words: the game.

I ate a small bag of hot and spicy banana chips and turned the edges of the pages crimson.

Music blared from the bar over the fence. Footloose, Night Nurse. You could hear the DJ’s patter but nothing else, no giddy, drunken crowd. 

I had to fashion a bookmark from a corner of paper towel.