I saw an orderly who had once been the lead singer of a local punk band. He was stacking trays and whistling next to a poster that listed the symptoms of Flesh Eating Disease. I went outside into the sunshine and walked all the way back, along the river, to my mother’s apartment. Well, I tried to walk along the river the whole way but was stopped by a group of young people piling sandbags around an apartment block. The river’s flooding again, they said. It was a bit of a party for them. A day off school. My mother and Aunt Tina weren’t at the apartment but there was a note saying they had gone to East Village to visit Signora Bertolucci, whose real name was Agata Warkentine but who was always referred to, by everyone other than Elf, as Mrs. Ernst Warkentine. Even funeral announcements in East Village omitted the given first name of a woman to ensure she’d forever and ever (and ever and ever) be known only as her husband’s wife. They had taken my aunt’s van. Then I remembered that I had left the car in the underground parking lot and so I walked back, this time not along the river but through the dusty city streets, to the hospital.
