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Incident at Jamaica Bay
- Abstract
The sunset Nathan Lipinsky watched from the roof of the parking garage—of a color as brazen as splashed paint—suffused the fading Indian summer clouds and fell with tender touch on Brooklyn’s recumbent city blocks. Nathan imagined the light falling on the whole of Brooklyn: on the autumnal leaves of Prospect Park, on the gravestones of Green-Wood Cemetery, on the storefronts of his native Brownsville, and over Ebbets Field, empty now, a year after the Dodgers fled to Los Angeles. After taking a few steps in the direction of his car, he stopped and turned his gaze again to the west, where a few cirrocumulus clouds, dappled mauve, evaporating, reached to the horizon. A fresh evening wind brushed his upturned face, thrumming a faint murmur on his eardrums, and coalescing into an inchoate voice that stood out insistently from the ambient city noise. This voice summoned him, though not by his given name, the name assigned to biography, the name that yields to time and to dust. It summoned him, instead, by another name—the name he would have known himself by, had he known himself at all. That true name was who he really was—and it lay always just beyond the range of his hearing, as if beyond a closed door.
About the Author
Peter Lopatin is a freelance writer in Stamford, Connecticut.
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