I arrived in Chicago. I had no idea what state she may have been in. I had been absent for a year. Honestly, however high I may have held my head in my self-imposed false good mood, still my steps were leaden with guilt. In the fantasy I had been entertaining for my homecoming, Lydia looked exactly as she had that day when I first met her, when I was a child, the day of the experiment with the peach in the box. She was young, healthy, gorgeous, with all her long blond hair, her skin smooth and her eyes alive with youth, and so on. Lydia smiling, Lydia laughing, Lydia stroking the rich red-brown fur that I had back then. The door would open, and that Lydia of my memory would somehow be standing there. I wanted the door to open into a time machine, which I would program to take us back six or seven years, and then freeze time, just hold it there. Gwen, I once saw a wonderful film about the life experiences of Superman. At the end of the film, Superman’s girlfriend, Lois Lane, is crushed by a collapsing bridge because Superman was too busy with other matters at the time to save her. But not to worry, because it turns out that not even the space-time continuum is too immutable for Superman’s prowess and ingenuity. Superman flies into the bubble of near outer space surrounding the earth’s atmosphere, then starts flying so quickly around the circumference of the earth, over and over, that he succeeds in reversing the direction of the earth’s rotation, which somehow acts as a massive “rewind” button for the planet. Then he zooms back down to earth, saves Lois Lane from the falling bridge, then zooms back into space and considerately recorrects the direction of the earth’s rotation. It’s this last bit that I would have omitted from the procedure, had I Superman’s powers. I would have sailed up to the ionosphere, spun the earth backward to a day when Lydia and I were cohabiting this apartment, together, in youth, in love, but before her sickness, and before I could speak—and then I would blast back to the outer rind of the atmosphere, and through a difficult series of maneuvers, I would fly clockwise a little, then counterclockwise a little, left, right, left, bit by bit, until I succeeded in making the earth just stop, and hang there, quiet, suspended, and still in the blackness of space. Then I would return to earth, now converted into a giant fossilized snapshot of some particular moment on some particular day in say the fall of about 1994—all around the world, forks frozen forever about to enter open mouths, people stuck at the edge of day in slippers with arms stretched in midyawn, murderers ossified with guns still smoking in their hands, lovers cemented in embrace—and I, Bruno, would put myself in that last category: I would float down to a certain apartment in Hyde Park, Chicago, and find a healthy young Lydia, and viably position her arms such that they conformed to the shape of my body, and slip into them, and shut my eyes, and join the vast stagnant earth at that precise moment, and remain there, forever.
Yes, I admit that I am not as altruistic as Superman. That is why Superman is Superman and Bruno is Bruno. I am not a hero. I am a cowardly pernicious sniveling selfish wretch, who would destroy the world for his own happiness. But does that make me a villain?
I stood before the outer door to the apartment building, glancing up to notice the honking flocks of blackbirds that burst and fluttered from tree to tree in the blue and orange gloaming of that March day. I steeled myself, and sank a long purple finger into the buzzer. I hopped up and down on the toes of my shoes in anticipation. I crushed the green roses to my nose and drank them in. I took in a deep breath and let it slowly out. I cleared my throat. I wondered if she wasn’t at home. I pressed the buzzer again. A moment later, a crunching of static and a voice—a woman’s voice, but not Lydia’s—electronically croaked through the speaker.
“Hello?” said the crunchy voice in a confused but polite tone. “Who is it?”
“Lydia?” I said. My voice squeaked. I cleared