On the very day I'm gone

I like trains. Admittedly my formative ideas of train travel are fifteen years out of date, so it continually surprises me that I can check my e-mail from the Amtrak Regional (and that we may experience random identity checks along the way, as the driver just announced along with the station stops¹), but the Northeast Corridor still looks the same from a right-hand window seat in the quiet car. Snowcapped and sunlit, everything looks curiously miniaturized, like decoration for a model railway: a parking lot, a baseball field, a cemetery, a cut-out of low-lying water among snow-spiked reeds and flattened branches, reflecting a matte gunsteel blue duller than the cirrus sky. Graffiti on the retaining wall and the sidetracked freight cars snaps out in greens and blues and rust-backed reds. The tracks curve weathered black through the small drifts, choppy with twigs and bent grasses. I walked down the middle of the street to catch the 85 this morning because the sidewalks were all hard-tracked ice. It wasn't Boston's April Fool's Day Blizzard, Part Two: Fooled Again, but it'll do until the next time, I guess.

derspatchel is sitting next to me, having made a highly popular and sadly relevant tweet. We got to South Station by the same train—the same car, even—but the Red Line was such sardine standing room only that we couldn't be sure until we disembarked. We looked for each other through the crowd and saw only strangers' winter hats and backpacks. The bus was also a sardine tin. I seem to have slightly pulled the tendon that runs to my right thumb, trying to get my backpack out of the way of a fellow commuter. It diminishes my ability to text, but not type. We just left Providence, ghost signs sliding away past us on industrial red brick. I like old warehouse buildings, too, whose bricks are the right color; they crumble into desert roses, not crayon tips.

I have not been to New York City since 2014, when everything started to fall apart. I don't expect this trip to perform some kind of miraculous reversal, but I would enjoy no further catastrophes. This time we're staying with one of my mother's cousins in Brooklyn, which always feels like a family story. Both of my grandparents were born there. My great-grandfather's pharmacy was on Coney Island Avenue, where there were fountain sodas and my grandmother played as a child with drops of mercury, magical and shivering; my grandfather was born at the corner of Broadway and Hooper, where his parents ran a general store—"5¢, 10¢, 19¢ and Up"—by the Hewes Street BMT Station. I do not think any traces of either remain except in books, memories, old address listings on the internet. After they left for graduate school, they never lived in New York again, although they retained it for the rest of their lives in their voices and their stories. My grandmother died in Portland, my grandfather in Boston. Every time we visit Coney Island, somehow I expect to find them there in the crowds. They would be separate—they didn't meet until Iowa—but I would recognize them.

I lost time looking at maps of Brooklyn. We are into the salt marshes now, tawny as fall. The open water is a richer blue than the sky, wind-corrugated; the snow is a thin subsiding skim at the edges of rocks and the lee sides of trees and the dry stone walls that run beside the tracks have no webbing of ice between them. An enormous white swan is preening on a half-submerged boulder, watched by a quizzical shorebird. We seem to have reached Connecticut. If I see Richmond City, I'll give a call.

1. Passengers were also reminded to wear their shoes when entering the restrooms, which good God who wouldn't.

We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, and what more do you want, mermaids?

So I read "The Trinitite Golem" at the Brooklyn Commons Café as part of the launch party for Clockwork Phoenix 5, now available wherever clockwork phoenixes are sold.

It went wonderfully. I had a wonderful time. I got asked afterward if I was a physicist. Rob Cameron, Shveta Thakrar, Barbara Krasnoff, A.C. Wise, and C.S.E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez read from their stories and were fantastic. I hope all the recordings came out cleanly. There was apple cake. It turns out that the famous lefty radio station WBAI is now broadcast out of the same building as the Commons, which neither my husband nor I (nor my parents, who used to wake up every morning to Phil Ochs' "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends") knew before we spoke to Jim Freund. There was a lot of hugging. People were signing copies for each other like they were yearbooks. I am still operating on about three hours of sleep, which I plan to remedy almost immediately.

derspatchel bought a bottle of Coney Island Brewing Company Mermaid Pilsner in order to be able to present me with the picture of a tattooed siren. I think it is a good trophy.

I am so glad I did this after all.