You Were Wrong by Matthew Sharpe Page B

have my blessing, you know.”
    “For what?”
    “To be her boyfriend, despite this other fellow who seems to be back in the picture and who, by the way, if you mess with him, you really ought to know what you’re doing, which you don’t.”
    “What is he to her?”
    “Again, I don’t know.”
    “I’m surprised I have your blessing.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you hate me.”
    “Of course I hate you, you’re an idiot and a schmuck and you tried to kill me.”
    They entered the Long Island Expressway, rolled up the windows, and drove west toward the city. They gazed at the road ahead, two suburban bumpkins on their way to the great metropolis. Buildings of increasing severity drifted past their eyes. At around Garden City—a place that had metastasized past the name Earth’s first man had given it—fear entered the car through the vents; a cubic foot of it lodged in each man’s lungs. They trembled, tried not to let each other see. Each fell back into his wounds, first exaggerating, then undervaluing them, oscillating back and forth, groping not for an accurate medical assessment but for the proper moral one. How serious an affront to the integrity of each fellow’s noble soul had the attack on him been, and what was the appropriate response? The denizens of the Volvo’s front seat tried first to hate their attackers, then to forgive them, held each position imperfectly and briefly; so much hard discernment made them numb, and so they remained till Queens.
    “Here, here!” cried Jones. Consciousness reclaimed them from their sabbath stupor and the car lurched onto the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
    “The BQE, Interstate Two Seven Eight,” Jones said with the professorial joviality Karl dreaded as a proctologist dreads a patient on a bean-and-prune diet. The road’s distinctive character evidently had begun to help Jones enlist it in a healing return to his habitual activity of converting the world into a rambling monologue. “In its heyday as a not-yet-actualized idea it really did eliminate congestion on your local streets and thoroughfares. One of its proponents sold it to the citizens of Brooklyn by telling them they could use it to get to the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows in less than half the time it would otherwise have taken them. So it got built, or partway built, and these Brooklyn men drove their wives to the fair, and the wives wanted to experience the robot—the robot was a big hit with the ladies because they were invited to sit on its lap and be groped by it—cold steel hands beneath skirts so long and formless they doubled as family planning—how could an ordinary human male compete with that?—and thus were sown the first seeds of resentment toward the BQE, except for the seeds of resentment that were sown when hundreds of homes and shops were demolished to make way for it, and the other seeds of resentment that were sown when the thing ran right through the Red Hook section of Brooklyn in what is technically known, I swear to you, as an open-cut format, which means a canal is dug right through your neighborhood, the highway’s laid down in it, and on summer nights the cars’ poisonous exhaust fumes billow up out of the open cut, through the open window, and into the open lungs of your baby asleep in its crib, while in the meantime next door in your more affluent neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights a whole different BQE scenario is unfolding wherein the houses are untouched, no open cut is dug, onto the West Bank of Brooklyn Heights is grafted a thin strip of land where the westward-streaming road is stacked on top of its eastward-streaming brother, and on top of that is placed an eight-block-long wooden promenade on which the genteel and far more politically influential Heights residents—is there a location in the world with the word Heights in the title that is populated by your poor starving huddled masses yearning to be free? I would bet no—could stroll and sit on simple yet