By Benjamin Lytal.
Dawn stamps the window and tells the blinds’ outline. Ten minutes later, sunlight taps the floor. The Matchbox gasps. Its windshield crystals; the air inside grows tight. You’ve been sitting in there—in a tiny toy car—all night long. Its doors, of course, do not open.
1982: black plastic injected, cools. A line worker, somebody’s father, snaps windshield into frame, lays, with huge fingers, black plastic seats and dash within, and lets the machine affix the diecast undercarriage, “made in China.”
1984: into the hands of a boy who was fine that the doors did not open. What he wanted was not an imitation of the real but a charm against it.
The car was a trapezoid of inside air. And he carried it, in the gigantic dimensions of his faith, into the grass, onto the patio, far beyond the reach of men and garages and telling-how and grease, and rammed the clean plastic car against his targets—a birch a fence a neighbor’s wall.
The car is not important. Forty years later, now, here, his children come running in on cute graceless feet. The boy much slower than the girl. The sun-striped room goes bam bam bam bam. From inside the car you can barely see above their knees. They ignore you.
Later that afternoon, in a reversal, the children are napping but he comes into the spare room. First he stops at the window and hoists the blinds. Slowly, as if afraid the string will break. Blinds up, the high-rise window glares with dirty brightness. Dust floats on indoor thermals. It motes. You see his enormous tennis shoe at the bookcase.
Layers of foam pudge. Grommets stare. He reads standing. Laces wilt.
Children’s voices. Book shuts. On his way out he spies the car.
His own parents must have brought it here. Ten toy cars zipped in a Clinique bag. For the grandkids. His hand lowers and gathers you into the air. Here comes the thumbnail. The keratin crescent tests the windshield. Comes a thoughtful grunt. But the windshield holds.
Having briefly picked up the plot, he sets you down again. You sink back into safety. Night falls. Dishes clink somewhere behind, in what must be the dining room. Family voices. The occasional siren of a child. Then all quiet. In a quirk they flipped the room’s light on right before bed, and forgot it, and so all night long you have to sit upright in that brightness, a driver in a tiny car, unsleeping.
Outside you can hear a party. There must be a terrace on a lower floor, or a penthouse one building over. So above the partygoers there hangs a golden rectangle—your window. If one of them notices it they think: there’s someone else up there, living about the same life as us.
Gray morning finds you still trapped in the toy car and yet elsewhere, already gone. All the window seems to hold is moisture and grime. The gray window a sponge, but the room still electric dry.
Into the dining room behind you come the children and their voices. They seem to have swum in from somewhere far away. The murmur of their dad like a goldfish maître d’, corralling, serving, making suggestions.
Something about running late.
Then his voice spikes—the name of the son.
Something tossed, it slops, a plate on the floor.
The table slapped so hard its brackets ring.
Silence. A little crying. For ten minutes, fifteen, no voice of the dad. You hear the closing of the door as they leave.
*
In fog. The city brims. Like an aerial camera worried about the humans you point incessantly down. This distance is angelic. From up here in the sky you can see how tiny people really are. Sunshine begins to lance the fog by pieces—but with no heavenly music. The people’s windows only peep. Their dogs grow bored. Their empty morning buses roar with effort.
Meantime your point of view glides—you’re not able to hover in just one place—you slide eternally to the east, almost out over the Lake Michigan, and have to scroll back and back to keep the one building in view: it’s an older skyscraper, short, a thumb. Its windows suppurate with all kinds of rocklike arches and corbels. A gargantuan brownstone gorged on elevators and cheap glass. For something so far away it looks fantastically detailed, a confection that probably has to be refrigerated to keep its shape. The whole downtown looks that way, refrigerated.
And then you hear a latch: a clear and consummated sound-effect somehow audible all the way up here. A miniscule red stroller appears on the street below.
“Would anybody like a hat?” he asks but the stroller doesn’t stop rolling.
Even though he’s down there on the pavement you can hear his voice as if he’s right up here beside you. But your point of view slides . . . the great green roof of the public library bulges into your sightline . . . you let yourself slide east, east, east.
There’s a gargoyle owl, flat graveled rooftops, a big intersection, another roof, a centipede of ventilation units—in your ear the man begins to sing. His voice sounds strangled. You scrolllllllll back, working yourself like a person in the 90s with not enough mousepad, and finally find them up on the L platform. They’re on the platform bridging Dearborn. Traffic beneath. The man separates a bit from the stroller. He’s a wiggly asterisk—his tiny form resolves, a heavy coat canted at the waist, he’s bent over holding a picture book above the stroller blanket. Loudly shouting the words over the traffic noise: “Words for times of day! DAYPEEP. DAYSPRING. MERIDIAN. MAINDAY. DAYLIGONE. DIMITY.”
“I’m sorry,” you hear him say. It looks like he straightens up and closes the book. “I’m not going to read right now.”
The girl: “Why not?”
“Because I’m still angry. I like this book too much to read it when I’m angry.”
Now their train comes. The way they board you can see his frustration, wielding the huge stroller like a forklift, sluicing between commuters in a kind of confident rage. Now the train pulls away; now it snakes out from between the buildings and down, as if pulled on a string between the crags of luxury south of the loop and further, past police headquarters, finally slanting southwest into Chinatown where you lose it, because you’re gliding east all the time and to have kept the train in view for this long you’ve had to repeatedly lurch out of pocket, like someone trying to sideways a fixed-wheel stroller in fact, hocketing yourself out of one groove and into another and it’s somehow exhausting, mentally. And what’s a morning for, anyway? Not this strenuous obsession. You let yourself go and drift out over the crater of Soldier’s Field and then beyond, into Lake Michigan. Until it’s all water and your height has no point of reference. You let your face go slack over the water.
They do not seem to own a car, you reflect.
And then you hear the man singing and recall yourself to Chinatown, west of Chinatown, and spot the red stroller coming away from an L station in Bridgeport and then passing under the tracks. Disappearing under that gloom he sings, “Here we go, down the road; / Where it ends, we don’t knowwww!” You hocket northward. On the other side of the underpass they come to what looks like a raw place where the nothing shows through, a destroyed section of sidewalk where a giant flat puddle is blinking at you. Only a margin of pedestrian clearance runs next to a broken fence. He makes the children get out, it seems routine, they know to climb up on the steep side and grasp the chain-link as they pick their way around the puddle while he turns the stroller around and drags it through furrowing liquid to the other side.
You can see what it is like from where you are. The wiggle that at this distance could be visual noise but actually must be a child’s ready leg and arm climbing back into the stroller. The fluidity that equals the family.
You work hard against your own drift now and chop farther north, block by block, dragged east, and then chopping north again. They follow over a bridge and past brick warehouses into a neighborhood with little shops and, turning down a side street, a fenced lot where children dissolve and spread like particles of gas.
Leaving the stroller in a space behind a building, he walks back to the avenue and stands to catch a bus. He has taken off his hat, apparently with sweat from all that pushing. At this distance you cannot be sure but you think you can see the wind play in his hair. But you are too big to ever be able to touch it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Benjamin Lytal teaches at the University of Chicago. He is the author of the novel A Map of Tulsa (Penguin, And Other Stories). His criticism has appeared in the The London Review of Books and elsewhere.
