I went running and tripped on a crack in the sidewalk. I broke my fall with my hand but also smashed my iPhone, which wasn’t in a protective case because the one I had didn’t fit in the pocket of my shorts. And even that didn’t make sense because I always carried it in my hand anyway.  The phone wound up with a deep crack in one corner that exposed its interior metal, like a cut to the bone. But the phone continued to work, until one night when it froze on the mail screen. I turned to Siri for help, but she just said, “Hmmm,” as if she’d found me on a list of iPhone abusers no longer worth helping, and so she didn’t. I groaned at the thought of losing part of the next day dealing with it. All of these conveniences that make our lives so much easier can eat up a lot of time.  

            Exhausted by the prospect of an inconvenient errand, my head hit the pillow like the mobile had hit the ground. I dreamed that I was holding a piece of clothing between my hands and a gale blew through and caught hold and made the clothing snap like a parachute and sweep me up into the sky. I flew above buildings, over a river and a soaring steel bridge that crossed it. I felt the thrill and terror of weightlessness, and grave concern because I didn’t know how to get back down. People below pointed. I couldn’t hear them but I knew what they were saying, which was that this was crazy and dangerous. They were full of concern, too, and judgment, thinking I had done this to myself on purpose. Even so, I felt in the moment as if I were performing for them, and even apart from this existential terror I didn’t want to let them down.

            The next day I saw a video clip on Twitter of a small child who was holding onto a kite when a great wind whipped it around her neck and lifted her into the sky. Either my dream was a coincidence or maybe the story was playing in the background somewhere and enough of it entered my mind, which lifted and repurposed the material. The kite was in the shape of a long ribbon, and it rippled in the air, spinning and tossing the child like a doll, folding her up, and threatening to unfold into a tragedy. Strange, too, something that I think has probably run through the mind of every child, that if they held a kite tight, or balloons, like Winnie the Pooh, they could take flight — and yet it seemed as if nothing like this ever happened before. People reached up and cried out like afflicted people pleading for divine mercy. Finally, thankfully, it was granted, and the wind abated and let her down into outstretched arms. 

            I was now heading to the Apple Store. It was a few blocks’ walk from my house, a short journey lengthened by having become a kind of obstacle course of people who tried to fly and landed hard, who now sit or lay splayed, holding signs or looking up as if they can see into deep space. Philadelphia was already stuck in a phantasmagoria of homelessness and broken people, was already the epicenter of the opioid crisis, even before Covid, which made everything worse. You have to choose whether you want to look or look away, which you do by putting in ear buds and retreating into some dissociative state of music or a story. Now and again someone will get angry at being ignored, but most of the time they seem to exist in a haze of resignation.

            I got my new phone and stepped outside to return to my office.

            When I crossed the street a young woman fell into step beside me, and a car charged through the pedestrian crossing ahead of us. She asked me if the driver was obliged to stop and let us pass.

            “Yeah, technically, like it’s the law,” I told her, “but we are in Philadelphia. People regard red lights as suggestions. It’s safer not to take anything for granted.”

            She asked if I knew the city. She had an address. Sort of. The corner of 12th and Chancellor. Philly has a lot of small streets that anyone who doesn’t live here and even many of those who do never heard of, lanes and alleys tucked between the main streets. Her blond hair was fashionably layered and piled high. She was reed thin, a thinness that made her look fragile. She moved her hands when she spoke in circular movements. It gave an impression of confusion, of someone trying to find her way through a cloud. She explained that yesterday had been her 21st birthday, and she’d had a lot to drink the night before.

            She didn’t remember the name of the bar where they celebrated. I told her that it was also my son’s birthday. He turned 22.

             She said she was staying with a friend. That’s whose apartment she was trying to find now. I understood that she was alone, that is, without family. They were, she said, all back in Pittsburgh. She had the best mother in the world, she said, the best mother in the world, she said again, and her father loved her, too, and she had to stop taking them for granted. She had to stop taking them for granted. No one should ever take anyone for granted, I said, but I suspect we all do it.  Because she’d seen a lot of people whose families didn’t care. “Damn, man, have you been to Kensington?” she said “It’s terrible. People are all alone. No one cares.” 

            The mention of Kensington was a hint to her back story.  Kensington is a working class neighborhood that has beckoned people who would launch themselves into deep space with just the fuel in a syringe. “Why did you come here?” I asked anyway. She shrugged, because, I suppose, she’d just told me: because of Kensington.

            “When I was 17 I had a boyfriend,” she said. He was a dealer. She’d skipped all the lighter drugs and went straight to heroin. If she could get clean now, she said, her daughter would not remember all of this. Her daughter was four years old. She knew that if it kept on for too long, her daughter would grow up wanting to know why her mother wanted drugs more than she wanted her.

            “Are you high now?” I asked.

            “Yeah,” she said. “I mean, just Xanax. The problem with Xanax is that you lose any sense of time. I swear, man, I’ve been walking for three hours, and my phone says the place is six minutes away. And I’m walking for three hours. It’s funny, but it’s not even funny,” she added with a sound that was half-humorous and half a cry of dismay. This seemed the essence of a deformed existence, that she had nowhere to be, but she wanted to get there already. 

            “I’ve seen so much,” she said. “Did I tell you I’m 21? I don’t know why I said that. I’m 23. I’m surprised I made it to 23.”

            She was an escort, she added. Now that she was purging, she might as well go the whole way. I imagine it was a relief to tell a stranger with no skin in her game. She was constantly with old perverts, and she said it in a way that meant that men had done things to her. I thought I knew what she was alluding to but asked anyway, if she been raped, though I wasn’t asking because I was curious as much as that I sensed she wanted to unburden herself. Oh, yeah, she said, and made a motion with her hand to indicate that it happened more than once, perhaps even regularly. One way or another she was forced into doing things she didn’t want to. They’d say she owed them for drugs. It was also common for them to take sex and refuse to pay. There are probably more forms of violation and humiliation than there are varieties of drugs.

            We arrived at the corner of the address. It was a dark alleyway, the back doors of buildings where with dumpsters that emitted the sour odor of summer garbage. I recognized some of the usual men who hung around there.

            She dropped her hands by her sides and let out a long breath. Now she wasn’t sure if this was the place she was trying to get to or if it was where she’d started out three hours ago. She looked at her cell phone to check or to call the person she was staying with. The battery was dead.

            “Okay, okay,” she said. “Well, it’s okay. I’ll figure it out.”

            I would have liked to offer her some kind words. There would have been no point in offering anything else. If I gave her money it would have been used for drugs, by which I mean that there was nothing I could offer that could give any real relief. I could have encouraged her to get treatment, but what was I going to give her or tell her that she didn’t know? Maybe it was wrong not to give her something to buy her a reprieve of an hour or two or however long a drug might take some of the weight off.

            “I hope you get out of this,” I said. “Don’t give up.”

            “You’re a nice person,” she said. “I can tell. Do you mind if I ask a question? Are you religious?”

            “No, I’m not.”

            “I’m not, either, but I grew up in a real religious house. I don’t believe in the Bible but I believe in something. There has to be something else. It might be the sun or a tree or it might be that lamppost. I don’t know. But I believe there is something bigger than us.”     

            I imagined her parents, not knowing how it came to this, what they could have done, or what to do now. There is time stuck in the Apple Store when you need to be at your desk, and time, evidently, that Xanax melts into formlessness. There is a parent’s time, which is flat time, a vast plain landscaped with memories. The ones that are cause for regret are bitter but it’s the happy ones that must cut you to the quick. Once upon a time it was Halloween and an adorable girl dressed up as a princess, and she was as real princess as there ever was, and it made her father feel like a king. They read books and poems and stories. So many pages had turned by now, and everyone knew what happened in the subsequent chapters. This is why all the king’s men and all the king’s horses could not put anything back together again: because it was not your kingdom that broke into so many pieces, it was your heart. 

            She opened her arms as if to put them around me, but caught herself. “Air hug!” she said, and wrapped her arms around empty space.

            “Yes,” I said, “perfect.”

            I looked at her, Magdalene in search of Christ: a skeleton on which to hang pretty clothes on, a beauty that couldn’t last under the assault of all this damage, the drugs, the lack of food, the weight of having too much time, all forms of abuse and self-annihilation. Even though she was an escort, it was impossible to imagine her as a sexual being. She was more like a discarded doll. So thin, so light, that if she held a kite and a great gale came, it would lift her up to the sky. Maybe by some miracle she would land securely in someone’s arms. More likely, she would continue to float higher, flying, spinning, thrilled and terrified, above buildings and bridges and clouds, beyond the light blue sky, and even higher, where there would be no one to witness, into the hands of whatever that something was that she thought had to be bigger than us.