All Around Atlantis by Deborah Eisenberg Page A

free one really is.
    â€œGreat leaps . Teleportation. The world is so …roomy . So full of oddments. But there’s that now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t quality about life that makes one so very nervous. Danger, as you pointed out just now, yourself. Danger simply everywhere. Everything destroyed, lost, forgotten…Well, that’s what they want, you know, most of them. ‘ There’s nothing about it in the reports ,’ they’ll tell you. They’ll say it straight to your face. Of course there are ghosts, people say. I suppose that’s some help. But a ghost is simply not terribly …communicative . They haunt, they grieve, that sort of thing. But it’s all rather general, you see. Because they don’t much really talk.
    â€œOh, didn’t you just love it when you were a boy? It’s raining outside, your mum’s still working in the shop, you haven’t a friend in the world, then you turn on the radio, and someone’s talking—to you . Oh, my darling! Someone is talking to you, and you don’t know, before you turn that radio on, who will be there, or what thing they’ve found to tell you on that very day, at that very moment. Maybe someone will talk to you about cookery. Maybe someone will talk to you about a Cabinet minister. And then that particular thing is yours , do you see what I mean? Who knows whether it’s something worth hearing? Who knows whether there’s someone out there to hear it! It’s a leap of faith, do you see? That both parties are making. Really the most enormous leap of faith.” He paused to devour the food remaining on Shapiro’s plate, and then looked helplessly into Shapiro’s eyes. “I mean, I find that all enormously, just enormously…” He shook his head and turned away.
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    Shapiro set his alarm for 6 a.m., and slipped out of the hotel before Penwad could come for him, consequences be damned. Ha-ha— the day was his! Screechy traffic flew cheerfully through the streets, and toxins gave the air a silvery, fishlike flicker as the sun bobbed aloft on waves of industrial waste.
    Shapiro walked and walked. He passed through grand neighborhoods, where armed guards lounged in front of high, white walls. And he passed through poor neighborhoods, where children, bloated with hunger, played in the gutters, their eyes dreamy and wild with drugs. Beyond the surrounding slopes lay the countryside—the gorgeous, blood-drenched countryside.
    In some parts of the city Indians congregated on the sidewalk. Some sold chewing gum or trinkets on the corners, some seemed to be living the busy and inscrutable life of the homeless. Their clothing was filthy and tattered, but glorious nonetheless, Shapiro thought, glorious, noble, celebratory—like the banners of an army in rout.
    Shapiro considered them with terror. The destitute. People who were almost invisible, almost inaudible. People to whom almost anything could be done: other people. At home, in the last five or ten years they had encamped in Shapiro’s neighborhood. At first he thought of them as a small and temporary phenomenon. But now they were everywhere—sleeping in parks or on the pavement, ranging through the city night and day, hungry and diseased, in ragged suits and dresses acquired in some other life.
    Everyone had become used to them; no one remembered how shocking it had been only a few years earlier to see someone curled up in a doorway, barefoot in freezing temperatures. Most of the time they were just a group at the periphery of Shapiro’s vision. But when a student failed to show up for a lesson, or no concert work materialized, or the price of the newspaper went up, or some unexpected expense arose, Shapiro’s precious hands would tingle. Injury? Arthritis? Even as it was, daily life was beginning to eat away at Shapiro’s small savings. And at such times Shapiro would see those other people with an