The wall that separates Michael's house from mine is so insubstantial and his rooms so prone to echoing, that even my dripping tap and his indrawn sighs came to belong to both of us in the silence that followed the deaths of his parents. Yet, it was not until the last of our neighbours left Tap Street and their grime-covered houses fell into dereliction, that a bond of sorts grew between us, - a lopsided friendship as delicate as an abandoned wasps' nest, and which, up until last November, had been dependant on my affecting a disinterest in him, in particular about his wanderings at dusk.
Ronna's mother is in survey research. We help her out by manufacturing interviews. Ronna's mother gives us each some of the money she earns. Ronna and I take turns being different subjects. This particular interview was commissioned by some sociologists at the University of Chicago. This is my first time with it, so I am playing myself.
He had become quite adept at breathing quietly, secretly, sometimes hardly breathing at all. He would practice when his mother wasn’t close by. He would imagine that he was gliding slowly through the cool dark water as if it was his air, his enormous body graceful in its weightlessness as he hunted octopus. But every so often he would catch a glimpse of a tentacle being sucked back into the blackness of a good hiding place and the doubts would begin to build. The questions. How badly did he want to breathe? Couldn’t he stay there just a bit longer, just long enough for him to stab at the blackness with his trident? Sometimes he lingered, becoming dizzy, briefly satisfied. But the fear, the need to breathe would inevitably force his mouth open, and the precious air would rush in.
Nora was a girl (now I'm thinking of her as a girl, rather than a woman) with dyed reddish hair that looked natural enough until you really looked into her eyes and saw more gray than blue and realized that the hair color was not her own. Even then, you still believed in the hard fact of her goodness, the sturdiness of her character. You believed that nothing short of death would push her under.
The first one was a brown penny he'd found on the sidewalk. It stayed in his pocket as the trains roared by. He'd just wanted to see what it felt like almost making a wafer. The second was a piece of silver from his father's coin collection. There'd been a beautiful ship on one side with full sails -- king and crown on the other. It slipped off as soon as he pulled his hand away. He would've replaced the coin on the rail but was too scared. The third was another brown penny. Two trains passed over that one, the second welding it to the rail. He'd found his father's coin the day he'd brought the first nickel to the tracks. The train passed over both of them -- one wafer shinier than the other.
