Page 41 of Playworld

At the Sixty-Seventh Street entrance to the park, we could hear the faint clop of hooves and the jingle of carriages making the late-night loop. Through the restaurant windows, waiters reset tables at Tavern on the Green, snapping open white tablecloths that billowed before settling over the round tops. In the nearing distance stood the great black pool that was Sheep Meadow, bottomless. There was a cessation of street noise once we crossed onto its grass, this stiffened by the iron air, so that the lawn, made vaster by the darkness, crunched beneath our feet. I felt brave. I was certain we all did. We were beside ourselves, whispering and laughing, rousing ourselves, shushing each other, bashing into each other, notbelieving there would be a rendezvous, believing we were going to learn something. That we had decided to accept this invitation was in and of itself some sort of triumph, since good sense dictated this was the last place we should’ve been at such an hour.

The ambient light was bright enough to illuminate a smudged outline of the man. He was standing on the exposed rock, near the meadow’s tree line, a small outcropping atop this lake bed of grass that looked comparatively bleached. He wore an overcoat that rounded his shoulders and had his hands stuffed in his pockets. Atop his head, a hunting cap, brim folded up, that made his round face seem rounder. His large glasses were tinted. He was double-chinned, closer to tubby—thick, that is, but not hulking. At the sight of us, he flapped the coat’s panels a couple of times—in greeting? He seemed utterly unruffled by the fact that he was outnumbered, a confidence that we could only attribute to his adulthood and was somehow unsettling. It suggested an as yet unrevealed power—that he might, at any moment, spread his coat’s wings and take flight.

“You showed up,” he said.

Tanner, Cliff, and I stood in a loose crescent beneath the rocks, which made the man seem taller. Oren squatted behind us, his elbows on his knees.

“Let’s hear it, man,” Cliff said.

“The meaning of life,” Tanner said.

“Do I get your names?” he asked.

“You do not,” Tanner said.

“Fair enough,” he said.

“The floor is yours,” Cliff said.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “You know more about your feelings now than you will know ever. Swear to God. Something happens to you, say something good or bad, it doesn’t matter, and you let yourself feel it, and because it’s practically the first time, you don’t rationalize it or analyze it or overinterpret it, it’s just the thing itself. You don’t build a shell around it, it pierces you, it enters you, and, swear to God, if I could go back in time, you know what I would eliminate? What I’d lobotomize from my brain? The future. I’d let myself experience everything as it happened like you do now instead of wondering like I always did. Why isn’t this someother way instead of that? When will things be different? Better? Will they get worse? Do you understand?”

“No,” Tanner said.

“But keep going,” said Cliffnotes.

“It’s complicated, what I’m trying to explain,” he continued. “It’s inside-out thinking, but if I could communicate it, you’d realize that right now you are the most honest that you will ever be, and if you could somehow stay that way, then you would triumph over life, swear to God, because at some point soon, and maybe it’s already happened, you’re going to get hurt badly and repeatedly, small hurts over and over, things you don’t feel right now, like tick bites or leeches attaching to your skin. You’re going to stop listening and feeling and instead start making arguments, every day of your life asking yourselfwhat isn’tinstead ofwhat is,and then it’s all over already. You’ll think you’ve bitten the apple, but really the apple’s bitten you. Your argument for what isn’t becomes the world and you become the argument and then it’s already happened: the beginning of adulthood.”

“I don’t follow any of this,” I said to Tanner.

“I think I understand,” Tanner said.

“This guy’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” Cliff whispered.

“Because phonies think they know,” the man continued. “But phonies don’t know what they don’t know.”

“Like my dad,” Oren said.

“You’re saying something bad is going to happen to us?” Cliff asked.

“Something bad happens to everyone,” he said. “Except it’s not bad. It’s justsomething.That’s the trick. Recognizing it’s just something. That’s the difference between pain and suffering. Suffering’s the former and pain’s the latter.”

“I’m confused,” I said.

“So what happened to you?” Cliff asked. “When did you stop feeling?”

“I have never stopped feeling.”

“When did you stop making an argument?”

“I have not stopped feeling or making an argument. I fight against not feeling and making an argument.”

“But when did you know,” Tanner asked, “that you weren’t…not?”

“Excellent,” he said. “I know exactly when I knew I wasn’t not. I know exactly when it happened.”

“Okay,” Tanner said, and rubbed his hands together, “here we go.”

“It was in Hawaii. Have you ever been there?”