Bridge of Sighs

know what I done to deserve this,” as if someone could maybe explain it to him. But he was clear about what he wanted, at least. To remain with us, at Ikey’s, not to sneak off somewhere like I’d tried to do this afternoon on the Bridge of Sighs.
    I swallow the humiliation of my cowardice as best I can, reminding myself that tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep, I’ll be more myself, but right now the truth is that I’m about as dispirited as I’ve been since my father’s death, when I realized I’d have to navigate the long remainder of my life without his star to guide me. In the weeks and months after he was laid to rest, I slipped into what I now realize was a deep depression. My mother and Sarah seemed to understand what was happening but were powerless to prevent it. No doubt I refused to acknowledge that I needed help, even if they’d known what to offer. In my grief and rage I’d become obsessed with the poisoning of our town. I bought a blown-up map of Thomaston and mounted it on the wall, updating it daily by means of obituaries in the newspaper, placing a black pin where the newly deceased had lived. A nurse who worked in the hospital’s oncology ward helped me verify which deaths were due to cancer. In the beginning I stuck to the relevant facts, recording each subsequent cancer death with another black pin. But before long, impatient, anxious to indict, I started including people who’d recently been diagnosed as well as others, like old Ikey Lubin himself, who’d died when I was a teenager. I was mapping, I believed, the tendrils of cancer snaking outward from the polluted stream. In the end, however, my map took on a metaphorical quality. The black pin behind the Bijou Theater marked where Three Mock had been beaten into a coma, though he actually died years later in Vietnam. I put another on the street where David Entleman hanged himself. I even gave two black pins to the Spinnarkle sisters, who’d fled town rather than face neighbors who now knew their terrible secret.
    Gradually, even I came to understand that the purpose of the map had metastasized. Somehow I’d expanded my definition of cancer to include any malignancy, any poison, any wickedness, until what I had was a map of cruelty, of violence, of human frailty, a map so full of personal significance that it was devoid of objective meaning. It was Sarah who helped me realize it had become like the drawing I’d done of Ikey Lubin’s as a boy, shading everything so that the longer I worked on it, the darker and murkier it became, and ultimately even the thing I loved most—Ikey’s itself—would have disappeared in the prevailing blackness. This was precisely what happened to my enlarged map, the black pins engulfing my entire town. Absent white space, there could be no pattern, no meaning, no significance, except that I’d succeeded in mapping my own despair. I didn’t come to this difficult realization all at once but slowly, patiently, over long months as Sarah gently coaxed me back to my life, just as my father had done after my spells.
    What occurs to me tonight, though, is this: sure, it’s the business of adults to rescue children, but what sort of grown man needs to be repeatedly hauled back into his own life? Wouldn’t it be kinder to cut him loose and let him finish his journey? What I told Sarah over supper tonight—that I’d have eventually returned on my own, even if she hadn’t been there to help me—may not, this time, be true. Before encountering my father, I’d been deeply content to make that journey across the Bridge of Sighs, and even now I feel the gentle downward slope of the smooth stones beneath my feet, the gentle and insistent pull of gravity. Keeping my promise to my father not to drift away? That had been uphill, hard. And had he not been there to remind me of my duty…
             
     
    A FTER A TIME, Sarah joins me in the den. I swivel in my chair, and she places another chair right in front of me so we can face each other, knee to knee. Much like an adult would sit with a child, it occurs to me.
    “I’ve been talking to your mother,” she says, which doesn’t surprise me. “She thinks you should have another scan.” Sarah knows I won’t like this idea. How many MRIs and CATs have I endured over the years, and to what end? My spells may resemble strokes, but in fact they are not, as the doctors mostly agree, as the scans all show. But this
was
a bad episode. Three full