chapter 2 - 2

“They are throwing us out!” He brayed like a mule and bubbled up at the mouth. “Throwing us all out!” He shook a document up between us. He choked it and throttled it and waved it around. He was trying to squeeze it out of existence. I couldn’t tell what it was.

“Who is?” My heart conked itself sideways in my chest.

“The fire department came! The people from the city came! We are being evicted by the city!” he cried. “Enrico is crazy with madness! He says you did this! Is it true?” The bubbles ran down his chin. He’d have killed me right there, it was in his eyes, bloodshot with hatred, but he was too damned broken to do the job.

“I didn’t… I don’t know,” I said nothing.

On the South side of the park I paused and took a seat on the grass near the spot where the Hangman, Daniel Megie, once had a small wooden shack to keep him warm when he wasn’t busy hanging criminals or burying their corpses. I wanted the first trip to my new home to last - I wanted to enjoy it for all it was worth and didn’t want to think about the hangman. There were better things to think about. No more bastard subway at five PM! I’d walk home from the job on Twenty-First Street, a civilized man - I patted the grass - on civilized ground!

I took it all in, the mid-summer revelers, bouncing children chasing grinning dogs - mutts and pups folding themselves in half with joy as they tripped up and down the steps at the edge of the fountain, the pool in the center tinted smooth orange with diamonds set ablaze by the setting sun.

And then unable to leave well enough alone, it came - the flip side. It smashed down hard against the inside of my skull. The whole park turned over on a pivot like a tremendous coin flipping from head to tail: The cool shade, the children, pets, and tourists, the musicians, hotdog vendors, all of it vanished in one wrenching flip. The park came up and spun over like a ten-foot thick pancake tossed on a giant, dark griddle. Now, instead of cherry Italian ices and grass laced blankets against nine acres of summer paradise there was a horrific landscape painted in hellish blacks, nightmarish browns tinged with blood and green mire. The underside of the park took its turn. Tens of thousands of skeletons hung broken and tangled from torn, towering root structures of inverted trees. A miserable stench of disease and decay belched up through viscous rot. Splintered headstones studded the scene, giant teeth strewn across a dark battlefield.

The police were at Enrico’s when I pulled up to the curb with the U-haul, two cruisers and an ambulance. Enrico had hanged himself in the livingroom of his apartment. He dangled from a thick hook in a ceiling beam that had once held a brass chandelier belonging to his mother. The hook was available because Enrico had sold the chandelier for six bucks to a junk store down the block. He died flanked by two large oil paintings, well-rendered portraits of his youthful mother and father, once prosperous and well-respected patrons of the church. They had watched from their strange and timeless vantage, as their son made the last bad decision of his life.

The park flipped back around. I stood up, wiped off my trousers and shouldered my briefcase. The children ran again in the creases of their own shadows, the wind came up and pushed leaves in the trees into a summer song. I turned out of the park into what was about to become my very own Greenwich Village thinking, “That, that was not my fault.”

I walked the two blocks to my new apartment. A quiet and cautious elation replaced the aggressive joy I had felt on the far side of the park. I was starting something new. I hadn’t chosen it for myself but it was given to me, a gift of the flip side. The U-Haul loaded with all of my possessions sat parked at the curb outside my new home. I’d parked it there in the morning before going to work. My life was waiting to be unpacked. That made me smile. Before I turned into the foyer of my new home I readjusted my telepathic link for optimum transmission as I put my key into the door. “Fuck you, Enrico” I whispered, “Fuck You!”