Walt
7 Walt Amid the bustling shipyards, he walks: crates and bare-chested men, that’s all he sees. Slowly, I have to tell him, point out how all the men are fully dressed, everything hefted by a giant crane. But already he has run ahead. When I find him in the market, he is clapping his hands watching children dance around a fiddler. “Walt,” I say, “we’re in a modern shopping mall.” I watch the children disappear from his face. We are standing in Hot Topic; someone is selling a thirteen-year-old girl a studded dog collar and a midriff shirt. We walk on through the Gap, Penney’s: glittering handbags, lingerie, cargo pants. In the electronics aisle of Sears, he collapses to the floor, before a bank of TVs. I look at him, a broken man now like the rest of us, crying, ashamed. He tells me he wants to be alone. I don’t know where he goes wandering—through a single rose, along a kelson of grief, down the avenues of the nineteenth century? I wait the night in an empty parking lot. When he returns, he tells me we must sing. ...
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