A year or two ago, I got an external Seagate disk drive. After giving it a day or so to settle in, my friend asked me if I was having fun with it: “are you gamboling in the gigaswathes:)?” she asked. The metaphor was apt.

There is a topography to our experience of the Internet, and indeed myriad landscapes to traverse, the deeper we delve into the technology. Gamboling might have been a rather frisky way of describing what I was doing with/to/in my hard drive, but I was, at the very least, skipping and humming along. Directory structures (’folders’) are paths that have to be walked, programmatically as well as through mouseclicks: we navigate. There are planes and edges to data, information, and the Internet. There is a front-line, and the front-line is in a line of code. The topography of information—and of the Internet—is being written in real-time. I was gamboling in the gigaswathes.

The metaphor of landscape to describe the experience of creating and of using networked information captures a defining feature of the Internet, which is the fact that its topography—the structure of its links; what links to what—takes on semantic significance, and therefore ideological implication. A group of links has an ulterior motive. If you liken a garden to a website, then the rosebushes, or the koi pond, or the Japanese bridge, or any other arrangement of elements—their design, form and function would mean something, and point somewhere.

Grouping links—creating a web page, or web site—requires certain technological shenanigans, and until recently this presented a barrier to the creation of web pages by ‘lay people’. The forum, and then the blog, were breakthroughs that allowed anyone anywhere to group links and provide multimedia commentary, thus collecting and presenting a point of view, and, in a post-Althusserian world, therefore an ideology. This kind of self-publishing is crucial to freedom on the Internet.

There was a train of thought here. It will pull into the station in part two, I hope.

The city of brotherly love finally opened its arms and embraced me, a few days ago. After harboring me—a New York refugee—on ambivalent terms for almost five years, Philadelphia held my head in her hands and punched it a few times.

I was mugged by three kids on July 3rd, 2007, around 9pm, on Farragut St, just south of the 46th/Market Street stop. I think it may have been on Farragut and Ludlow, but I am not sure. The 46th Street subway stop on the Market-Frankford line was closed that evening, and I decided to walk down to the 40th Street stop. I turned into a side street—I think it was Ludlow—with the new Nine Inch Nails blasting on the headphones. Out of nowhere, somebody struck me on the left side of my face. My glasses were knocked off.

I was disoriented, and to ensure that I stayed that way, a few more punches were landed. I managed to stay on my feet, and started to talk to the two boys—they can’t have been more than 16.
—Guys, guys, relax, take it easy.

Another punch. They were directed mainly at the face. A third kid joined the other two entrepreneurs, and was bobbing and angling, looking for ingress. What do you want?, I asked stupidly.
—Gimme everything you got.

The third kid found an opening, and split my lip. He was about 14.
—Relax, relax. I have $40.

I don’t know why I kept telling them to relax. I must not have taken them very seriously. Or I thought I might talk my way out of the situation.

I reached into my pocket. They took a step back. I pulled out a $20 bill, and handed it to the chief entrepreneur. As soon as he took the bill, I broke through their ranks (the three of them ranged about me, and I had my back to the bushes from whence the first fellow had surprised me). I ran. I had sneakers on, having just played tennis. I also had my freak on. I ran towards the light, which, contrary to what the books and movies will have you believe, was sodium yellow (and on Farragut). The boys followed me for about two paces, then stopped. I like to think it was my fleetness of foot that discouraged them, but it was probably the light. Besides, they got $20 for their trouble. As I was running, a car turned onto the boys’ street, and I waved and yelled Turn. Around. The car backed away.

After ten to fifteen minutes of stumbling around, I found myself at the 40th/Market subway stop, and went into a fast food store. By some strange coincidence, the two women who had been in the car that I waved away were there, and recognized me (I did not recognize them). They asked me what happened, and I told them. The store owner gave me free lemonade. I got into the subway, iced my face, and went home, where I got more ice, then took some photographs of my face.

I spent the 4th of July, 2007, in bed for the most part, pondering violence and masculinity and whether or not I should go to the police. I still have not decided on the police, but I heard today that another friend ‘nearly’ got mugged near Baltimore Avenue. I will have to talk to that friend, and eventually decide on whether or not to go to the police. (Apparently he did go to the police, and they drove him around asking if he recognized anyone).

Best case scenario, the police patrols around 46th and Market increase in visibility (if they exist at all), and muggers wise up. Worst case scenario, the police catch the kids, and throw them into juvie, and they become statistics, and another family or two (or three) perpetuates the vicious cycle of urban violence. Most likely scenario: nothing happens. I suppose the onus is on me to go to the police. Instead, I write blog pieces and post them into the cybervacuum.

I am healing nicely, two days after the mugging. And I have nice new glasses.

Declan met Delighting at a dance, on the small tropical island where they lived. That is how he always remembers the story, and the way he still likes to tell it, forty years later. She was the junior head girl at the All-Girls school. This was back in the days when Declan was just figuring out that he was a poet: when he spent his days cutting class at the nearby boys’ high school, where he was in his last year; days he spent drinking coffee at the provisional shanty-teastall outside the wrought iron gate of the All-Girls school. His buddies at the teastall were old men whose wives had barred them from drinking rum, or who drank tea for their health. Most of Declan’s rough and tumble schoolmates — in unbuttoned polyester shirts, cocked collars and poses of nonchalant lounging — preferred the rumbars and smokeholes a bike ride from their school. They didn’t understand why Declan preferred the teastall. What de scene dare? they asked. It dirty.

It not dirty, Declan replied on cue. It only look dirty.

He liked the downbeat lojinks of the teastall, with its corrugated roof that housed only the crosslegged proprietor, and the single makeshift table on the ground and the three collapsible stools around the table. Declan liked the teastall, and then there was the steady stream of readymade muses at the All-Girls school.

With one foot on a stool, pen in dextrous hand (connected to an elbow resting on the knee of the propped, posed leg), and a cup of coffee in the other hand, Declan Boylan was: Still Life with Poet, Lurking. In those days, the air was humid with talk of revolutions, spooks, client states, race and riots. Mulatto Declan — of half-Irish, half-Caribbean descent — mainly listened, and kept an eye out for the girls. Sometimes he would catch the students just before the eight o’clock bell, but more often he saw them when school broke at three. Declan watched the precious All-Girls girls being dropped off and picked up by their parents. One or two of the older ones knew Declan via other avenues, but they did not speak to him while they were at school. He didn’t know Delighting back then, when she was just a pretty face in a crowd of pretty faces.

One afternoon shortly before three, certain tropical clouds amassed overhead. The piercing blue of the island’s sky, almost chemical in its saturation, started to fade and grade into grey. The clouds grew staticky and clotted, and within two minutes a few fat drops of rain had artfully tinged Mr Declan Boylan’s new poem, lying on the teastall bench, with tearbursts. He nodded, a pleased poet. Every few seconds, an increasingly slender raindrop divebombed his cup of coffee. As the other three customers left, looking for cover, Boylan started to swirl the tepid coffee, and to study his swirling, and to wonder how long he should wait before thinking about deciding on what to do next. The sand that the proprietor had strewn about the teastand, to keep the dust from rising, stippled and turned muddy. The sun seemed to take the rest of the day off; the afternoon said: clearance sale, going out of business.

The patter of rain on the corrugated roof picked up, and each raindrop hit the teastall’s one remaining customer like a bullet, mainly around his temples, but then soothed the skin with a warm plashy kiss which ran down his sideburns and dripped off his jaw. Declan folded his latest verse manuscript, now timelessly blotched, and put it away, then turned his cinegenic profile to the sky. The wind got busy etching hollow noses on the raindrops so that, surreptitious, they would first burst on the skin and only then sting. The tops of trees were avidly reading vibrations in the airwaves and from the lightning that branched across the sky. Men’s voices were raised, the All-Girls three o’clock bell rang, and thundering typhoons lashed down in slivers and splinters of rain on the little island in the Caribbean.

Declan, now a wet loiterer outside the school gates, sauntered indoors for cover. A girl, in her grey pleated skirt, white blouse and monogrammed prefect’s badge, was lining up the younger girls whose parents had not yet arrived. She saw him wiping his sleek head with a sopping square of something, call it silk. In those days, before the inevitability of male pattern baldness had caught up with him, Declan wore the long soft locks of a sensitive soul. Under her gaze, Declan mopped his head suavely, but when she wasn’t looking he reamed out his watery ears, pinched his nostrils, bulged his eyes and blinked. The lightning, as they say, flashed, and Declan hawked expertly to clear something in his head. His ears popped just then, just as she caught his eye again, and they looked at each other for a flash-photographic moment until the pressure equalized in his head, and she smiled at him.

Let’s say your life is a dark pool: Declan Boylan, decades later. He is a wised-up mark these days, at sixty. Suppose that the waters are dark until waves ripple the surface of the pool. Now suppose those ripples glint like filmstrips, flashing images and evoking voices. Suppose furthermore that events — first kiss, first time, first vows, first child, next child, death of a parent, adultery, new job, more adultery, death of remaining parent, last time, final kiss, last touch, final loneliness — events are dropped, plopped, into the pool of your life. (The pool of the memory of your life: Boylan being specific). Events drop such that each one ripples the surface, makes waves through time and memory, and the waves periodically lap onto the sands of your consciousness. The sands, Mr Boylan decides. Past events are always lapping at the sands of your present consciousness. We can say that some — big, flapping — events make waves that lap frequently. Other ripples come by once in a blue, but nevertheless periodic, moon. It is the size of the event, its shape and dimension and its momentum, that — Boylan struggled to finish the thought — that determine the nature of the waves the event makes on your life. Some events, dense, hydrodynamic, sink quickly and hardly make a splash, but then boomerang back on you in the mixed metaphors of your nightmares. Other events, hooked fish and harpooned whales, thrash and make a commotion and a fuss, and become part of your story, the story you chat about with all sorts of people.

On a darkened, stormy afternoon, a slim Indian girl smiled at Declan while he took shelter under the driveway portico of her school. Around them, the falling rain slowed and glided to the ground while the opening tinkling strains of `Riders On The Storm’ pitter-pattered in Declan’s head. Meanwhile, she lined up the younger girls and did other important junior head girl things. The storm cleared in a few minutes, and the sun apologized, beaming down on a new world. Declan left the All-Girls school, passed the shanty-teastall and headed home. There he set the new, rainsplashed poem to music, then set about writing more poems, all dedicated to the girl with whom he believed he had shared a moment and whose name he still did not know. Over the remaining course of his final high school year, our Mr Boylan wrote one hundred poems, of which twenty were set to music. He continued to lark about at the teastall, but never once tried to speak to the girl he had his eye on, though he saw her two or three times a week. He was satisfied — in fact, he preferred — not knowing her, or her name. In his poems, she was You, or Ambrosia, or Amritsar — this last a concession to her ethnicity — a constantly deferred, anonymous muse.

For Declan, seeing You one ear-popping, gibbous-eyed, suddenly stormy afternoon — like the sun’s foreclosure, a bankruptcy of the day — was the second kind of splash.

A month after his fatidic afternoon downpour, which marked the beginning of the rainy season, eighteen-year-old Declan graduated from high school. When the speeches were over and the diplomas safely stowed away, there was a fashion show organized by, and starring, the graduating class of the All-Girls school. Students and parents from both institutions were filed and ranked on benches and on chairs outdoors, in the football field of Declan’s school, for maximum seating and minimum comfort. The boys whistled and whooped in the migraine-bright afternoon as the models came strutting out, one by one and in pairs, just like on television, just like in New York. Declan had eyes for only one girl. After half an hour of sashaying sarongs, a regiment of semi-mandarin collars, a staggered stage of pseudo-African headdresses, quasi-Indian kameezes worn over jeans, and the odd sari or two — the girls wrapped and sweating, trying not to trip over their hems and heels — the show ended. Declan stared at the program in his hand; the models’ names meant nothing to him, all he knew was that his girl, of the lightning cloudbursts and popping sinuses, was not one of the girls he had seen on stage. Then the loudspeakers announced the show’s organizer and designer, and she came out to take her bows, and it was her, and she wasn’t even graduating that year.

Declan pocketed the envelope his parents gave him as a graduation present, said he would be right back, and lurked outside the girls’ dressing rooms, waiting for her. He heard squeals and coos through the door — the girls were excited, the show had been a success, some were now considering modeling as a career: Miami Munich maybe Milan. Declan rehearsed what he wanted to say. Hey, that was a… Hi, congratu… Hello, rally good sh…? Will you be at the dance this eve? Yuh comin tonight?

The door opened and she entered.
— No men allowed back here, she said.
— That was a great show. Rally well done. Congratulations.
— Thanks. I know yuh, nuh?
— So I’m Declan, and I wondering if yuh coming to the dance tonight.
— Declan? I see you at the teastall, nuh?
— Yeh.
— Sure I coming tonight.
— O.
— …I’m Delighting.
— But that’s beautiful!?
— ? she said.
— ?
— I don’t have a date, nuh? she said.
— O. Well, then, I’ll see you there.
— If you say so.

She was not Delight, like a lost goddess, nor was she Delightful, a flower of bliss. She wasn’t Soma or Manna or Honey. She was Delighting, a gerund, expressing generalized or uncompleted action.

When he was older — during his Thirties, before he got himself married — Declan Boylan used to tell people that the happiest time in his life was that particular year he dated Delighting. Their romance was the stuff of legend, in Mr Boylan’s head. The clothes they wore that evening, during their first date, took on deeper shades of meaning: his deep purple silk shirt, unbuttoned and worn over a white T-shirt and black trousers, seemed to shimmer in sympathy with Delighting’s blue silk cheongsam, with its sleeveless shoulders and mandarin collar and column of buttons down the front. In Mr Boylan’s recollection, the evening’s boisterousness (young punks, rum) became a backdrop of pleasantly bracing tension. The broken punch bowl, the inexplicable clogging of the toilets, and the distraught hotel staff, all faded from his memory and became a mere susurration of real life, other people, leaving only the ballroom setting and Delighting.

Declan showed me curled photographs, yellowing and red-eyed, of prom night. Shiny faces, arms around shoulders, fists raised in mute solidarity with the revolution, knees bent in half-hearted mock can-cans. The men made leering faces, all bluster and joy, while the women were frozen in poses of huddled discussion or batting eyelashes. Makeup and perspiration, hair grease and drink. There was one particular photograph of Declan and Delighting that he treasured: he, fruitlessly tall, leaning with his head against a wall, looking down his nose, while his torso arched away, purple shirt hanging open, his legs rearranging themselves somewhere below the frame of the picture. She, arms crossed, barely up to his shoulders, looking away from the camera, her hazel eyes luminous from the reflecting silk she was wearing, bored, enigmatic. That night they kissed, and the following day became a couple.

Over that summer, Declan discovered that Delighting’s mother and father, the Roopnarines, were far stricter than his own biracial parents were. The Roopnarines were neurotic and overprotective, stressed by Delighting, because she was a girl approaching marriageable age who showed no interest in the boys who met their approval; and distressed by her brother Anand, five years younger, because he was a beloved son who demanded reverence but needed babying. Declan started to visit the Roopnarines in the evenings, twice a week. Mr Roopnarine, university professor, welcomed Declan with less iciness than his wife. `You know how your electric guitar does work?’ he asked Declan, while in the kitchen Delighting cajoled Mrs Roopnarine into serving soda in the good glasses. Declan did know, but politely shook his head. `It have a amplifier?’ Mr Roopnarine said. Pickup, sir? `Yes, the pickup is a magnet, it have a field, a magnetic field, and when the string wibrates, it picks up the wibrations in the magnetic field?’

Declan started several obscure jobs, but by the end of the summer he settled down to tending bar at a local club. Delighting returned to school for her final year, and during her school recesses, if prefecting and head-girl duties permitted, she would have a cup of coffee with Declan. The months passed.

Around Christmas, because their daughter had been accepted early decision into a good college in New York on a full scholarship, and because she would be leaving the following fall, and because of Declan’s polite persistence and patience, the Roopnarines permitted him to take Delighting to the movies. `What is the harm, wife?’ Mr Roopnarine said. `Cause,’ he sang, `she leaving on a jet plane, we don’t know when she be back again?’ Mrs Roopnarine, faced with her husband’s crooning, softened. But, she said, she would not let them see American movies together. `I saw that Lauren Bacall,’ Mrs Roopnarine said, remembering her one time twenty-odd years ago watching an American movie in a theater.

Declan took Delighting to the single drive-in on the island and watched Hindi movies with her on Friday evenings. `OK, so in this movie, three brothers are separated in childhood and raised by different fathers,’ Delighting said. `Amar is raised by a policeman, and he grows up Hindu. Akbar is brought up by a Muslim tailor. A Catholic priest looks after Anthony. All the actors playing these men are Hindu.’ During the movie, Declan placed an arm around her. `Look at this,’ Delighting said. `Amar is a fine, upstanding cop, he’s always in uniform. Akbar has a part-time career as a ghazal-singer, when he’s not tailoring, and he’s always in kurta-pajama and wears accessories, like that scarf around his wrist. Fine. And Anthony, he’s a good-for-nothing, a drinker, a layabout. But the thing is, Anthony always wears the best clothes… he’s in flared pants, or a tux and top hat, he even looks good in the altar-boy outfit.’

— You’re right, that’s rally wared, Declan said, placing a hand on Delighting’s thigh.

In the fall, two months before the Iranian hostage crisis began, Delighting enrolled at the Clausewitz Institute of Technology in New York, to study fashion. When she left their little dot on the map, our Mr Boylan went back to writing poetry at the teastand. His bartending job had led to more opportunities-he now played guitar with the club’s house band. He was prepared to wait for her, to see Delighting that Thanksgiving, if she visited, or Christmas, when she visited. In October, the mellowest month, he received a carefully worded letter detailing the problems with long-distance relationships, the juncture of their diverging lives (`at this juncture of our div?’ she wrote), new ambitions, other people (there was a motorcycle mechanic, and an out-of-work movie special effects `person’).
Declan Boylan moped. At home, he moped. When he played gigs, he moped on stage in front of tourists. At the teastand he wrote about moping. Some of this writing, through nighttime processes too complicated to explain, became poems of mope; other daytime efforts he called moperock lyrics. One of these was set to music. Some unclassifiable stuff resisted easy categorization and he sent it off to Delighting in ten easy installments over as many days.
He decided to pursue her, and made arrangements to holiday with her on Florida’s isthmus-midway between the Caribbean and New York-for a week. Declan told his parents he wanted to see the music scene and make some contacts in Miami. He bought himself a ticket with his remaining graduation money (carefully folded and hidden inside his expensive guitar where no one would ever find it) and flew out to meet Delighting, feeling grateful, touched and honoured that she was devoting Thanksgiving, her first in America, to him. Mr Declan Boylan brushed aside Delighting’s gruff excuses (she didn’t have enough money to go home, nor any family in New York, so she thought next-best-thing?) and saw through to the truth: that she missed him and wanted him to take her back.
It was, contrary to eternally springing hope, a week of hotel rooms, diners, and friendly unloving. There was no making up: none of the take-her-back kind, none of the it’s-been-too-long-kind, none of the so-what-do-you-want-to-do kind. Delighting was distracted and she insistently spoke of New York with fresh rapture: she loved her classes, hated her peers, and had heard that William Burroughs was leaving the Bowery to move to Kansas… The motorcycle mechanic was out of the picture (in a fit of rage he had broken her window and lacerated his fist); the special effects `person’ was now `Alex-my-roommate’. And there was a newer someone or other. Declan went home. His parents asked, and he told them about his vacation (`The music industry’s rally wared in America,’ he extemporized; and `She fine, she a little vex,’ he said).
Some time later, while writing a bright, brittle thing about moping, our Mr Boylan hit upon a new idea. He finished off the poem, and then convinced his fairly liberal, island-bound parents that he needed to study in America. `Sound engineering,’ he told his father. `That what I’ll study.’ The Boylans, pleased to see their son pursuing a vocation, agreed to pay for part of his education.
He saved up. He tended bar, played gigs in various chutney-soca clubs, and he hosted poetry readings. He used the tips from this last to pay for coffee, which kept him awake at night in order to write new poems that he read out at the next reading. He managed to get one year’s tuition and New York rent together-when he got there, he figured, he would sort out the following year’s expenses. In the spring, he went to the Wry Technical Institute to learn how to become a sound engineer, but he secretly hoped to become a poet and/or rockstar.
He understood, and gave others to understand, that he was there simply to attend Wry Tech, and to make music. Delighting just happened to be in the same city.

For all their galoomphing about, men reserve the right to die before their wives: although these days Declan’s brown eyes are starting to fade and cloud with age, he feels that he is starting to see things-his own life-more clearly. Women deserve to live longer, he thinks, if you can call it deserve, if you can call it living. No parent should outlive their child, and no husband his wife. But Declan had not been so fortunate.
Summer, Declan’s wife, used to say that she would understand if he left her for Delighting. Strange woman, Summer. Her parents were American mid-life hippies who had settled on the northern atoll of Declan and Delighting’s binary island-nation. During the post-war oil boom, Summer’s parents were part of the international flotsam that washed up on the island. Mr and Mrs Blaze lived and laughed and went hippy in the Sixties, soon after Summer was born. They considered other names for her, their firstborn: Gloria, Crystal, Autumn. They considered April, May and June, but settled on Summer and hoped that her baby blonde hair would not darken as she grew older-the thought of having a brunette daughter named Summer Blaze filled them, especially Mrs Blaze, with an unnamable, non-specific dread.
In the diminuendo days of the oil the island’s streets and dirt roads were haunted by rusting hulks of boats that passed for automobiles, great big American cars that had been purchased during headier, wealthier times, but which were now too expensive to service regularly. Many of the foreigners left the country, but the Blaze family stayed on and moved to the northern island. Tourism was replacing oil as the country’s leading industry, and the Blazes worked first as bartenders, then as hoteliers at a local resort for American tourists and servicemen. These visitors and transients came for the limpid blue Caribbean water of the northern island, and were ferried up on `glass boats’ through which they marveled at and photographed the friendly marine life. The flower-power Blazes welcomed these vacationers, smoked ganja with them up front and center, and sold it on the side to stick it to the man. Although Summer was not directly addled by her parents or their pot, all three had a lasting influence on her-a complaisance or an ease in her manner and outlook.

Miss Summer Blaze met Mr Declan Boylan in New York, where she was working as an assistant editor at TeenMag, an influential rag for nascent fag hags. One day in the spring of Reagan’s first year as president, before reality shows and everyday personal computers, Summer was sent on a mission: to find eligible young people in Manhattan who were willing to participate in TeenMag’s blind date experiment. Summer walked around the West Village, casting keen looks at the people around her. She signed up a girl from New Zealand, a tourist in town for another two weeks. Now she needed to find a guy with whom to pair off the New Zealander, and see, there was one, lanky, long-haired, crouched on his haunches, poking a wary finger at an old typewriter for sale on a Sixth Avenue sidewalk.
Declan had, in fact, just arrived in New York three weeks ago. He had stayed with Delighting for the first week. Some questions were resolved during that time: he discovered that `Alex-my-roommate’ was male. And with her classes and his apartment hunting, he barely spoke three words to the girl he realized with a shock was now his ex. Still, during that first week in the City, Declan had wrangled an apartment, a spacious two-bedroom on Mercer Street with two other men-sublet from a New Wye U professor of Women’s Studies who was on sabbatical for a year. He was to begin classes at his uptown vocational school in a week.
Since Boylan was considering thinking about deciding to become a professional poet, he figured he needed a typewriter. There were perfectly preserved old Smith-Coronas from the Forties and Fifties in the antique stores in the Village, in beige bodies with green keys, or aquamarine on sky blue. Boylan could not afford these older art deco typewriters, and at any rate as a poet he felt he needed a beat-up black bug, all sticky keys and undulating, meandering type. There were more recent, but ragged Underwoods for sale in the flea markets and on the streets. He was inspecting one such machine on Sixth Ave when he heard a voice behind him.
-Scuse me hi.
-…?
-Hi, my name is Summer, she said handing him her business card, and I work for TeenMag, and we’re doing.
-Summer? But dat beautiful.
-Thanks. So we’re doing an article on blind dates, and we’re looking for people to go on blind dates, and then tell us about how the blind dates went. What’s your name?
Introductions were made. Summer asked him where he was from, and Declan told her.
-I knew it, she said. I grew up there!
-Nah! Dat rally wared, Declan said. To meet someone from back home, here. How could you tell where I was from?
-From your accent, boy, you does talk de talk, how me eh go notice? Summer turned on her own Caribbean patois.
She told him a little about her job, and the article she was working on, and then asked Declan if he would like to go on a blind date. Declan, new in Manhattan, alone with two roommates who had grown up in Brooklyn and had been friends for years, accepted Summer’s offer. Here was a girl of established charm and good looks offering to send him on a date with some other girl, potentially also pretty, charming and available; and then Summer, the first girl with the beautiful name, wanted to have him come back and tell her about the date with the second girl. Declan accepted.
He bought the battered typewriter, then rushed to his apartment and called Delighting to tell her about his upcoming blind date.

Continue to Part II

His classes at Wry Tech started the following week, and Declan forgot about TeenMag and Summer until she called him, two weeks after she had first recruited him. He was given a number to call, instructions to follow, and a girl to meet, all of which he did. Afterwards, Summer debriefed him:
-So how did it go? Seated in her office, she looked less fragile than Declan remembered.
-Terrible, man. She does hate me. Why yuh went and set me up with her? She does have a New Zealand accent, I didn’t understand a word she say.
-We had three couples. You were assigned each other randomly. We gave one couple $5, the second couple got $10, and the third couple $15, for their dates. The rest was up to you.
-Yeah, but ah only get $5.
-So you had to be creative, not just dinner and a movie for two. So what did you do?
-Bowlin. Went bowlin.
-How was that?
-Well, yuh can read about it in my writeup, nuh.
-And then?
-We did go to McDonald’s for ice-cream sundaes.
-What?
-What?
-You took her to McDonald’s?
-I only had a duller left.
-?
-So hear, nuh, Declan said.
-?
-Yuh does wantta get sumtin ta eat sometime?
-And a movie afterwards? Summer smiled.
-Sure.
-Sure.
-?
-That’s creative, she said.
Declan was overjoyed. That evening, he crowed to his roommates that he had met three women since arriving in New York less than a month ago, two of them brand new. The Brooklyners were unimpressed, so Declan called Delighting to tell her all about the bowling, and his upcoming date with Summer.

It-dinner and a movie-went well. Summer told Declan about how she had arrived in New York the prior year, with nothing but a high school degree and a suitcase. She had called up some of her parents’ friends, and had taken rotating advantage of their couches and floors, never overstaying her welcome, which averaged about five days per couch. She did this for two months, applying for various jobs, until she was hired as a receptionist at TeenMag. A kindly editor had her housesit for his friend until she could afford an apartment of her own. At the magazine, for six months she did the eight-to-nine hustle, then went home and wrote little articles-on being an American who had set foot in her own country for the first time at age eighteen; on what she thought the Eighties had in store for the fashion world; on being a single woman in the City; on growing up white in the Caribbean. She showed these articles to the helpful editor at work, and he told her to keep writing them. After her tenth article in two seasons (Fall, Winter)-on whether the idealized woman’s figure in the Eighties would maintain the Sixties’ and Seventies’ svelte, or cyclically bloom to the hourglass silhouettes of the Forties and Fifties-Summer was promoted to assistant editor.
Declan was impressed. He told her that he wanted to be a rockstar and/or poet, but was not sure what kind. She asked him to show her something he had written, and he said sure, the next time they met. They arranged to have dinner again, shook hands and parted ways.
Declan went home and called Delighting.
-What de scene? So you went out with her? Ow.
-Yeah man, I think she does like me, Dee.
-What she does look like? Delighting asked, and suddenly giggled eh-eh.
-She have brown eyes, darker than your. And she rounder, yuh know?
-…Eh bwoy, yuh sayin she have bigger tits? Delighting let out a short scream.
-Too big. And hips, man, she curve like a windswept coconut tree.
-… Muffled yelping over the phone.
-Man, yuh dere?
-…I here. So, she black? She take good care a yuh?
-She white, man, blondie.
-…Ah. We go? mmm? chat later?
-Sure, sure.

On their next date, Summer and Declan learned more about each other. She too liked the Doors, he discovered.
-Which is your favourite song? Declan asked.
-Well, there’s only one possible favourite for me, she said, and sang:

Morning found us calmly unaware
Noon burn gold into our hair
At night, we swim the laughin’ sea
When summer’s gone
Where will we be?

-That’s the best part of the song, Declan agreed, excited.
He learned that she, too, had written poetry, but had given that up for essays and articles. He showed her five or six of his poems, from the You-Ambrosia-Amritsar century, and Summer encouraged him to keep writing. They went for a walk around Union Square, and she told him that a hundred years prior, it had been the same kind of place-cafés, beautiful people promenading, but with calèches and broughams instead of yellow cabs and cars. Summer had fallen in love with the City upon arriving, and she was taking the time to learn all about it.
They started to see each regularly after that. During the day, Declan went uptown to Wry, while Summer worked at TeenMag’s offices in Union Square. In the evenings, they met either uptown, where Summer lived, or in the West Village, where Declan lived. It was a convenient arrangement-at either apartment, one or the other was in the part of town where he or she needed to be. Every month or so, Delighting met Declan, and they had coffee near Astor Place. She was learning so much at her own college, busy with textiles and portfolios and looking for internships with the New York designers-everybody wanted to work with Machiavelli or Lev Bronstein. Summer knew about these rendezvous with Delighting. Declan made sure to tell Summer about the love of his life, and he made sure to keep Delighting informed about his current girlfriend.
The year passed quickly. Declan experienced winter and snow for the first time. His lease ended (the professor of Women’s Studies returned from France and founded a new department at New Wye U, the Center for Critical Phallogocentrism, which opened for business in 1981) and Declan moved into Summer’s apartment uptown. This was even more convenient for him than before-his classes were now only ten minutes away. With only a second year to go before getting his diploma, Declan started to work part-time as a studio assistant, while his parents paid for the rest of his expenses.
In the evenings, Summer was delightfully domesticated, a creature of pure benevolence. She made Declan’s favourite food from back home, doubles. On weekends, she tended to her bonsai and made curried goat, while Declan assaulted her with the process of converting his latest poems into songs. Once a month, Declan packed some of the curried goat and presented it to Delighting during their coffee sessions. Sometimes, Delighting brought her latest flame with her, her newest boytoy or most recent manboy. They were all artsy types, her gentleman callers, and they reflected Delighting’s latest thinking on fashion and trends: there was a vicious Brit with safety pins in visible as well as undisclosed places; there was a fellow fashion student who tried his best to be androgynous and of ambiguous sexuality, but was flagrantly, unstoppably straight; there was a rastaman who looked forty but was twenty; there was an ageless junkie. But when Delighting came alone, Declan would get on his old hobby-horse, The Book Is Not Over:
-When you an I go get back?
-Darling, we’re done and gone, now we’re just good friends.
-The chapter is closed, Dee, but the book is not over.
-What book, bwoy?
-The book of our story, the story of us. It have more chapters.

Another year went by. Declan and Delighting went home (she during Christmas, he and Summer during Spring Break) to visit their parents and flaunt their newfound New York worldliness, and to gently taunt the left-behind islanders for their small ways, their accents and closed minds. Each returned to the City with individual relief: Delighting, because New York was now her home; Summer, because she wanted to get on with her life; and Declan, so he could repolish his American and be back where Delighting, or Summer, was.
A British band named Duran Duran had hit the airwaves Stateside. After a sputtering, backfiring year, The Eighties had finally arrived, all hair gel and narrow ties and new synths replacing the old Hammond organs. Delighting hunkered down and waited for the storm to pass. She resolutely avoided wide belts and shoulder pads. She cringed at the crimped hair all around her. At one point she wore only black or white, but then that became faddish, so she wore grey-risky, at best, for a south asian-but for nearly a season she got away with wearing ash, smoke, dove, gunmetal and stormcloud grey.
Declan looked deep within himself and decided to embrace the new age. Already irrelevantly tall, he managed to add a good three inches of pure hair to his six-feet-seven. He stopped writing poems and stuck to songs. He became obsessed with profundity. During dinners with Summer, he discussed Duran Duran’s lyrics:
-I love the line `Fear hangs, a plane of gunsmoke drifting in our room.’ I just love the image of fear hanging in the air like smoke. But why gunsmoke? It’s rally striking. And when he says `O, I walk out into the sun, I tried to find a new day / But the whole place, it just screams in my eyes’. Isn’t that great? It screams in my eyes. It’s like, how can a sound be seen? Fuckin A.
-Sometimes, said Summer, I think they’re just random images. I mean, every now and then there’s a good bit, or a bit that makes sense. In that song? wait, it’s `Careless Memory’, right?
-Of course. Declan sang: It just screams in my eyes.
-I think it’s called synesthesia. Anyway so there’s the part where he says `On the table signs of love lies scattered.’ I like that, I imagine, I don’t know, a lipstick-smudged glass of wine, a crumpled tie.
-Yeah, maybe. And then he says `And the walls break with a crashing within.’ That’s brilliant! A crashing within. I love that!
-Crashing within what? The walls? The room? I don’t understand.
-I think they’re making love and the walls are crashing down.
-But the signs of love are scattered on the table.
-? Declan was quiet, affronted.
-But the rest of the verse is great: Summer placatory. She sang:

It’s not as though–as though you really mattered.
But being close, how could I let you go
Without some feeling,
Some precious sympathy following.

Even before his momentous twenty-fifth birthday, Declan began to feel that his life was slowing down. Or, if not slowing down, the stuff worth remembering, the bits worth retelling, were getting more spaced out. Perhaps it was a trick of his memory, but more likely he had made it so, selectively highlighting what he wanted to brood on. When Summer signed up for college, Declan settled down to the new rhythm that overtook the next four years of their life together. The strange sensation that he was forgetting what it was like to be in a relationship kept him awake some nights. There she was lying next to him, warm, curved, and in the morning they would rush off to classes together, and in the evening have dinner together, and yet Declan felt strange calling her his girlfriend, with whom he had this thing called a relationship.
The summer before the fall when Summer started classes at Vespucci, Delighting graduated from Clausewitz, and started working at Mau Mau. In high school `back home’, her designs and ideas had revolved around the multiethnic influences of her island nation. Anything too modern, to Western, would have been laughed at-aping America, they would have said, who she does think she is, Lev Bronstein? At Clausewitz, Delighting’s design horizons had stretched far and wide: she had the freedom to engage in high-fashion, or she could return to her `roots’, or she could incorporate elements of the latter into the former. When she graduated and started working at Mau Mau, her designs were all raw silk, brushed steel, and distressed leather.
Declan and Summer went to their respective classes during his senior year, her freshman year. A much loved singer (`Oh-woh Mister Poh-oh-oh-oh-ostman, come deliver the let-ter / The sooner the bet-ter…’) who was part of a brother-sister duo died that year, from what the papers were calling anorexia nervosa. For her final project of her first semester at Vespucci, Summer wrote a piece on anorexia. The singer had been only ten years older than Summer.
Declan graduated Wry Tech. He got a job doing studio work, while Summer attended classes full-time and waitressed part-time. At night, when it was easier, when they were more susceptible, they made plans for the future. Summer would graduate with a degree in journalism, and on the strength of her experience, she would land a sweet job with a City daily. Declan would keep on keeping on.

On his twenty-fifth birthday, Declan disappeared, then reappeared the next day, still drunk. He had spent it, the Quarter, alone, in the City’s parks, on moody benches. A quarter century with nothing to show for it, not even the automatic spasm of kids. He was two years into his studio job, then Summer graduated a few years later and started working at the paper, and then it was seven years at the same job, so Declan decided he had spent enough time thinking about deciding to get married, and he got himself married just before his thirtieth birthday. (When the thirtieth birthday came around, he spent it drunk with his new wife, Summer.)
Proposing to Declan was the most ambitious step Summer had taken in her affairs with him. She knew he would not get around to it until it was too late, and she wanted to have children. Declan had been with her since she first moved to New York, she could not imagine him not being there. They had a childhood on an island in common, and sometimes they quizzed each other on where they had been on a certain day at a certain time, mining their converging pasts for clues and auguries. They played well with each other. She knew he was constant, or a constant. King Declan the Konstant.
For the past ten years, Mr Boylan had thought of Miss Blaze as a walk-on, a stand-by, not part of the original plan; an understudy, a sequel. Second-choice, rebound, usurper. First runner-up. But now he found that after ten years of waiting for Delighting-waiting for her to come back to him, or to take him back-ten years (a third of his life!) of waiting for `the story of us’ to continue, he was losing hope. His career as a rockstar had been a no-go, a no-start. He still wrote the occasional poem, but these days he felt midway between who he used to be, and who he was becoming, and he did not see the latter as a poet. Summer was soothing, intelligent, pretty and she would make a good mother, he knew. She loved him, she grew to love him more as time passed. She was constant, Constance Summer. He wondered why she was still with him, and because he could not come up with a satisfactory answer, because his imagination failed him, he decided to get married and to somehow stifle the question.
The wedding was, as they say, a quiet affair: the Blazes and the Boylans flew over for a week, there was a functional church, functional friends and coworkers, dinner and drinks afterwards.
Declan did not speak to Delighting for nearly six months, because she could not avoid being out of town that day: Buenos Aires, leather chaps.

Mr and Mrs Declan Boylan were a happy couple. It was plain for all to see, and Declan would quietly tell me so, in case I had not noticed. She worked as a senior editor for the cosmopolitan section of the city’s leading daily. In the evenings, there were cocktail parties, book readings and diplomatic dinners to attend. Declan was now a partner in a new studio catering to reggae artistes, and he managed to land an album session with a young up-and-coming Jamaican singer. One of the songs went on to become a hit, and Declan’s business picked up. When America discovered that the hit song actually contained homophobic lyrics-unintelligible to listeners unfamiliar with the patois-business slowed at Declan’s studio. So it went. But with her income, they bought an apartment near Union Square-a one-bedroom in a doorman building near their old haunts, which they mock-mockingly called their old stomping ground. They had both spent over ten years in New York, America, and could calmly speak to others about their early days, school days, and now their married years.
Declan had felt affectionate towards Summer almost from the moment he met her. Over the years, this affection had grown into a feeling of fierce protectiveness, more fraternal than paternal, which she reciprocated. Their conjugal relations had been relaxed, less than a standard deviation away from the normal. Mr and Mrs Boylan enjoyed each other’s company, and several times a month the temperature of this enjoyment rose to bloodheat. Then Declan started losing his hair, and at about the same time Summer began to lose weight. Both losses were layered affairs. Declan’s crown started to thin, and he found himself unclogging the shower drain more often. He wore caps, or knotted two loose braids to cover the winking scalp. Summer, twenty-six going on thirty-two, at first started to take on shadow and bone around her face. Then she lost weight all over, from her now-penetrating eyes to her increasingly swervy calves. She had predicted that the Eighties would mark the return of full-figured women, and indeed the glamazon look had vindicated her. Now in the Nineties, idealized women’s figures had started to shed any baggage that was more than strictly, severely necessary; curves had started to straighten, hips to deflate and hair to lose height. Even before the emaciated opiate waif look took full control of the fashion world, Summer had started to foreshadow it.
Declan took renewed vigorous interest, and Summer suggested that they have a baby.
-The book is not over, Declan said mysteriously.
-What do you mean, D? she asked him.
-We’ve only been married three years. Don’t you want to enjoy a few more years of what we have now?
-Sure, baby, but my clock’s ticking.
-I hear it, baby, Declan said. But if you had a baby, we wouldn’t be able to do this? he said, this sending Summer into a fit of tickled giggles.

While Summer and Declan were considering children, Delighting was busy setting up her own design house. She rented a small space in the East Village, on 9th Street, and opened for business with a line of punky summer dresses and accessories, all heavy metal and leather. In those days, before The Space set up shop on St. Mark’s Place, 9th Street used to be where all the recent graduates of Clausewitz and other fashion schools set up shop. A few years later, The Space opened around the corner, and the neighborhood went yuppie after that. Some of the other boutiques-Delighting’s competitors on 9th Street-closed up soon afterwards. Delighting’s boutique-called Tripwire-added new lines, rather than toning down its existing ideology. Delighting realized that while The Space sold basics, clothing of the lowest common denominator, the new East Villagers would still be interested in edgier, more hardcore fashions. She had, in fact, anticipated the bohemian bourgeois generation, and it paid off. By the turn of the century, she had opened stores in SoHo and Union Square, and had backers and plans for new stores in Boston and Los Angeles.

When Mr Boylan was fifteen, he used to say: Life is very long. He read this in some poem. At forty, he shared this information, this intelligence, with his child.
The year before the Internet exploded with Orinoco.com and e-commerce, Mrs Declan Boylan, aged thirty-four, had a baby girl. Summer plumped up nicely with the bun in her oven, and when she was born they named their daughter Siobhan. Mr Boylan wrote a few poems for his daughter. He hired a DJ and went into the studio to mix `Siobhan’s Song’, a techno affair whose opening ambience would lull the child towards sleep, then jolt her awake when the drum’n'bass kicked in. Declan decided that he had reached the age when it was time to stop trying to make contemporary music, and stick to what he knew. His own halfhearted, unpursued dreams of being a rock star had died, but at least he still wrote poems and lyrics now and then. All I got is a red guitar, three chords, and the truth, he thought, while writing `Song for Siobhan’ which he sang with acoustic guitar for accompaniment. His daughter loved the song, and Declan sang it as her lullaby when she was a baby.
The millennium came and went, and the Boylans moved to the Upper East Side with Siobhan and their bonsai. They sent the former to a prestigious school near their apartment. Declan went into the studio two or three times a week, and every other year turned a profit. Summer’s hours got longer after she was promoted to senior editor of her paper’s international section, and she started to travel abroad more. She had slimmed down immediately after Siobhan was born in some sort of post-partum load-shedding. But over the past five years, overworked, she had grown underweight. She regretted that she did not have more time to watch Siobhan grow up, but Declan told her that every working parent felt that way.
-It’s the Nineties, baby, he said. Women are taking over the world. We men will raise the kids.
At night, when he put his daughter to bed, he told her:
-Life is very long, Siobhan.
-How long?
-Too long.
-Longer than my hair?
-Steuupps, Declan said like an islander, sucking his teeth and cheeks. Longer than your hair, girlie.
-Longer than a subway? she asked.
-Longer than a subway, nuh. Kiss kiss, goodnight.
On nights when Summer was in the City, and home early enough, she put Siobhan to bed herself.
-Mummy, how long is life?
-Life is short, sweetie, Summer kissed her daughter on the forehead.
-But daddy said stsk, tsk, life is very long.
-He did? He said that?
-Ya, he said it’s longer than my hair.
-O sweetie, Daddy only said that because he is so long. Life is not long. It’s short, like you.
-Daddy’s tall, mummy, not long.
In her own bed, before falling asleep, Summer would tell Declan, Life is short, D. And she would whisper further wisdom to herself, and to him: And it begins at sixty.

The World Trade Center was destroyed, and the following summer the Village was awash in combat clothing and dog tags, camouflage designs, green and tan. Then Summer was pregnant again.
-What do you mean? Declan asked.
-What does pregnant usually mean? Summer said, uncharacteristically cantankerous and bitchy.
-How it? I mean, it have protection, nuh?
-…
-…Nuh?
-I forgot the patch. Or I was late. Or it didn’t work. I don’t know, D. Maybe it had expired.
They argued. Then Declan said:
-Even though I’m Catholic, I think maybe you should think about?
-…
-Baby, you’re not young anym?
-No, Summer said. We’re having this baby, D.
-Summer, think about it some more.

She did, and by the end of the first trimester, it was too late to change her mind. This time, Summer did not become round and rosy with child. She stayed skinny, and put off maternity leave until the last possible moment. Afterwards, the doctors were at a loss. They said she was too old, at forty-one, to have another child. They said she had lost too much weight. Some nurses speculated darkly about diet pills, secret regurgitation.
Summer Boylan née Blaze died giving birth to her second child, Gavin.

By the time he was sixty, he had been called many names, and had even adopted a few, some of his own devising. Romantic, loiterer, ingrate, bulimifier. Pedestal-raiser, moocher, anorexific. For forty years Declan had been a nostalgic lovelorn malcontent in his own head. When his wife died, he was left with the outliver’s solitude to consider these names. She had left him and the children everything, including life insurance, a sizable portfolio with a low allocation of technology stocks, and the apartment.
Declan was inconsolable for a year. Summer’s parents, approaching seventy at the time of their daughter’s death, flew up from the Caribbean. Declan could barely look them in the eye. He felt he owed them an apology. It was my doing, my child. For all our gallivanting about, we reserve the right to die before our wives. She worked too hard. I didn’t know what was going on. Women deserve to live longer, if you can call it deserve, if you can call it living. She was too old. I grow old. I didn’t know. I didn’t see. I don’t know what I was looking at. I grow old. Maybe she had cancer. But the doctors would have known, wouldn’t they? I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Maybe I could sue.
He didn’t. At her funeral, he played a Doors song-not Summer’s favourite, but another one from the same album:

Winter time winds blue and freezin’
Comin’ from northern storms in the sea
Love has been lost, is that the reason?
Trying desperately to be free
Come with me dance, my dear
Winter’s so cold this year
And you are so warm
My wintertime love to be

And after twelve months of mourning, he began the process of making it up to Siobhan, who reminded him so much of Summer. Declan was now Lurking, Still Poet With Life.
In his late-forties, our Mr Boylan decided to let himself go, as befitted, he said, a widower of a certain age. He ate more curried goat, walked less, took more cabs around town, and slowly the pounds and kilos crept up on him. He had been waiting. The weight first settled around his abdomen, the inches a loose shanty-town of flesh that grew into tenement buildings. From his new paunch-rotund, commanding-the weight spread up, towards his chest and arms, and down, towards his thighs. Finally, after a several years of concerted eating, his face started to loose the contours that his black-Irish parents had given him, and eventually he grew jowls. The final effect was satisfying-his tremendous height and newfound weight combined to produce a silhouette that spoke of presence, of substance.
Except for the year after his wife’s death, Declan had always been an attentive father. Now he raised the children with a little help from his friends and a nanny or two. Siobhan grew tall and willowy, taking after her father’s youthful figure, but with her mother’s looks. She remembered Summer, preserved her memory, and visited both remaining grandmothers every year, soaking up the island sun and surf and songs. After college (where, on the strength of being one quarter black, she had been president of the African-American Students Union) Siobhan died her hair red, dreadlocked it, and shot to the top of the charts with her hit singles `Girl of the World’ and `Branched Lightning’. Gavin, who had never known his mother, and with a sister seven years older than him, and an indulgent father who overcompensated for his fear that he would blame the child for the mother’s death, had a spoilt-brat phase. He eventually grew out of it, came out of the closet, graduated from Vespucci University, his mother’s alma mater, and came to work for me.
Declan retired from his joke job when he turned fifty. He spent his fiftieth birthday-the Half Dollar-with his children, his business partner (to whom he sold his share of the studio) and me. In retirement, he spends his days tending to Summer’s bonsai, some of them half a century old, which are a living testament to her patient attention. For the last ten years, we have had coffee twice a week, every week. Siobhan and Gavin call me Aunty Dee, I am their parents’ friend from `back home’. At our favourite café, Declan and I talk about everything: politics, music, fashion, him, me. He tries to convince me that life begins at sixty. We shall see-perhaps in twenty years, I will agree. Sometimes we talk about Summer.
-You know, she used to say that she would understand if I left her for you, Declan says.
If he had said this twenty years ago, it would have been with special significance in his voice, expectation, hope, something like that. Now, he says it with muted regret. The Book Is Over. The August sun beats down on us, sitting outdoors on a sidewalk café in the City. The air shimmers with heat waves off the softened asphalt and from the fumes from buses; the sidewalks tremble with the shadows of smoke. These are the dog days of New York’s summer, and I am due for a vacation.
-What a strange thing to say, I tell him.
-She was a strange woman. A softie. Well, more than a softie, but less than a doormat, yuh know?
-A pushover?
-Something like that?
-… he says.
-…
-…I didn’t mean to…
-It’s okay Dee?. We’re getting old. Well, I am. Here I am, an old man in a dry month.
-So you know what?
-What?
-Gavin just designed a new sports bra. We’re marketing it in the fall.
-Eh-eh?
-It’s made from shape-memory alloy fibres woven into satin.
-…
-It’s a kind of metal that remembers its original shape, even after it’s been stretched or bent. So it’s like a perma-bra. You buy the shape and size that you find most supportive or flattering, and then you go bungee jumping or whatever. As you’re falling, the bra fights gravity and you retain your perfect bust.
-Dat rally wared. People will buy anything, nuh?
-If you market and brand it right. We’re licensing the bra to Machiavelli.
-Congratulations.
-Thanks, man.
We sip our iced coffees and watch the world go by on the street and sidewalk.

THE END