66 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
A BAKERSWEPTBY
You were already
losing your eyesight
last winter in Rome
when you paused in the doorway
at nine o’clock on a Saturday morning
and a baker swept by
on a shiny bicycle
waving a cap and singing
under his breath,
you didn’t know bakers wore
white aprons dusted with flour
and floated around the city
like angels
on a freshly baked day,
you weren’t sure why
morning halted
up and down the street
as you stood in the doorway
and a baker winged by
on a weekend morning
so new and pristine
that you looked into the sky
and for one undiminished instant
of misplaced time
you saw brightness,
brightness everywhere,
before a shadow crossed
the rooftops
and it was blotted out.—Edward Hirschmoans, a dreadful roaring to halt my son
in his tracks, keep him fleeing.
Three days of running from the fact
I did not know my son’s whereabouts
had broken me. My son’s roommate, as-
signed randomly one August night from
the pack of boys on a trip to the west-
ern U.S., boys who’d been summer camp-
ers together in Vermont for years, that
kid found stabbed to death, and my son
gone, no one knew where, perhaps a cap-
tive of the madman who stabbed my
son’s roommate, perhaps my son bound
and being tortured somewhere by the
kind of marauding monster who would
storm armed into a motel room, stab one
boy and kidnap the other at gunpoint to
enjoy, dismember, maybe eat him at his
leisure, his pleasure—that’s what I could
not stop myself from imagining as I ran
away from and ran after facts that might
explain a vanished son. Three days, three
periods of twenty-four hours each on
other people’s clocks, stretched for me
longer than any life span I could bear,
and I slid down a pine tree I’d been hug-
ging in a Vermont forest, crumpled to a
weeping heap on the ground beside the
tree’s trunk, my life’s time abruptly pass-
ing, consumed. Enough. Nothing. More
time than I could handle.
If I’d been an occupant of the car pro-
ceeding north on I-17 taking my son to
stand trial in Flagstaff, I would not have
been privy to what other occupants think-
ing, the lawyers’ thoughts, my son’s
thoughts invisible to me then as now,
tapping out letter by letter an invisible
story to make it visible. And rescue him.
Over the many years following that car
ride, Mr. Jackson, I got to know both
lawyers pretty well, stayed in one’s pala-
tial Phoenix home once, commiserated
often in my mind with the other as he
suffered problems threatening to drag
him down, out of his profession, till he
got well and practiced law again and still
may be. On the afternoon I handed over
my son to them, the lawyers were strang-
ers to me, except for several phone calls
exchanged and a description from a law-
yer friend of my then wife, my son’s
mother, recommending the one in charge
more than highly, without reservation.
Strangers or not, men I’d never laid eyes
on before, men into whose hands, liter-
ally and figuratively, I was placing my
son’s life while I waited for my wife’s
plane so we could drive to Flagstaff to-
gether. The two lawyers’ thoughts, my
son’s thoughts unguessable in the car
they were riding in to Flagstaff. Unguess-
able for me now, nor could the occupants
see each other’s thoughts that day in 1986
on an Arizona highway, though each
must have been wondering, more than
wondering, probably searching for clues
in each other’s expressions, gestures, si-
lences, maybe asking out loud, Who are
you, why are we here, where are we head-
ing, what is happening to me, us, how
will it end, whose story is this. As I try
to tell mine, will I find myself rolling
along, in a hurry or not, listening, learn-
ing their stories on the way to Flagstaff.
Will all our stories end or start once
more when the car doors open and cops
stand there waiting with handcuffs ...
At some moment before that Flag-
staff arrival is when your voice, Mr. Jack-
son, your song, “URML,” entered thecar. I want to say filled the car, but I
wasn’t there, was I. Don’t know who in
the front seats, who in the back. Was car
radio on or music just in my son’s por-
table tape deck, earphones. Car radio
playing I’m almost sure, somehow. Pods
wired to machines not so ubiquitous in
young people’s ears back in 1986. Ele-
ment of surprise part of story. “URML”
suddenly. A moment altered. Who is
playing car radio. How loud. Who tuned
it in. Who listens. How can a person
help listening. No matter what else, where
else your thoughts. If you wish to listen
or not. Could you ignore the radio, drift
off through a window, study fractured,
flat desert, gaze at spines of mountains
rimming the distance. Remember an-
other’s voice you are missing or trying
to forget. How can you not hear if a loud
radio fills a car. Or a good tune fills it
softly. “URML.” Did a lawyer or my son