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By Root 499 0

simply the words SPACE COSMOS ETERNITY had been penned along its flank like a logo. This was the Light Age, he said, every life a spiritual journey, essential and unique, lone journeys of self-creation that would ultimately bring humanity together out of a common respect for the depth and beauty of the human experience. He said all this quietly, lightly, falling silent with a smile and a little shrug. She asked him if he thought he’d live forever, and he said yes, because it was such a beautiful thing to imagine that it had to be true. He asked her to try to imagine she’d live forever, and she couldn’t do it on command, but later, on a crosstown bus, she looked around at the other passengers and saw the slope of a grinning child’s nose, and the arroyos of dried skin on an old man’s neck, and felt their proximity, their warmth, their inexplicable but undeniable eternality, and she thought to herself something she had never thought before: she thought, My fellow souls.

A steady procession of broad-bellied planes vault over the volcano, like ducks circling on a target wheel.

She continues walking, leaving the pay phones behind. Another block and she finds a square with park benches and sits down. Ray E. Carter Square, a triangle actually, as so many squares in Middle City seem to be, this one of cobblestones and bushes landscaped to resemble the surrounding buildings. She crosses her legs and hugs herself in the breeze. Directly in front of her on a cement pediment stands the inevitable bronze statue of a man in a cheap suit. His eyes, set too close together for comfort, stare menacingly at the fenced-in playground opposite the benches, where a little blond boy giggles and flies down the slide to the applause of his young, smiling, blond parents. The second his feet hit the ground the boy runs back around to clamber up the ladder and slide down again, again, again. He laughs joyously every time.

Nearby, a bulky old woman in a babushka and overcoat stands unmoving except for her right arm, which flails out repeatedly from a grocery bag, stocky fingers opening to release showers of gray breadcrumbs into the black, roiling pool of pigeons at her feet. Ursula wonders what a plaza would look like without an old woman flinging breadcrumbs. They must have to fight for their turf. All those lonely old ladies out there, and not enough plazas to go around.

Across the square the blond child tells his parents to watch him go down for the dozenth time. They watch, proud as ever.

A conspiracy against the children.

She keeps hearing him say that. She tries to recall the expression on his face. Was he speaking literally? Has he become truly delusional? She doesn’t think so. It sounded more along the lines of a figurative exaggeration, a way of describing the ugliness he now sees everywhere around him.

The blond family strolls off hand in hand in hand. Its place at the slide is taken by a thin woman and her dark-haired son, who climbs the ladder to sit timidly at the apex, clutching the rails. The son and the mother, recent immigrants, perhaps, look at each other with huge, dark eyes. The mother offers a strained smile, and the boy lets go of the rails. He goes down slowly, braking with his clunky black shoes, holding his hands out just over the sides. Halfway down his face lights up with the most heartbreaking, most tremendous smile Ursula has ever seen, as though the child had never before imagined he could ever be worthy of a pleasure so great. Once on the ground, he beams at his mother exuberantly, then takes a last, wistful look up the silver slope, not daring to wear out its patience by using it again.

Ursula walks the remaining blocks to the loft and rings the unmarked bell dangling by its wire from the door frame. A window opens on the second floor, and James T. Couch appears. He turns back toward his listeners inside.

“Just like I said. A Jehovah’s Witness,” she hears him announce. His face reappears. “Hey, get with it, haven’t you heard? The day of Liteness is upon us! The Lord is the corporation, and Lacouture is his prophet!