My grandfather went on a fishing trip in the country around New Paltz. “He caught nine rainbow trout!” There was pride and a vestige of fear in my mother’s voice as she relayed the news from the kitchen telephone.
The day after he returned to the city, my grandfather picked me up at school and took me out for a grilled cheese. Once the order was placed, he settled into the booth and sized me up with weary eyes.
“Morris,” he said at length, “I met a visitor at my hotel.”
“What kind of visitor?” I asked.
A gust of yellow leaves skittered past the diner window. He leaned in, damp and smoky. “A visitor,” he whispered, “from the beyond.”
Late one night, he told me, he was wandering through the hotel looking for ice when he saw an old woman pass through the wall. She had a blue halo around her body, the color of a lake in February. She sat in a rocking chair and began to knit.
My grandfather asked her who she was, and she told him she used to live in the house where the hotel now sat. She could walk through walls — it felt natural to her. Where she lived, there were visitors that she couldn’t comprehend. They were enveloped in exotic colors and passed through dimensions she couldn’t access.
“The beyond has a beyond,” my grandfather told me. “There’s an endless beyond.”
The food arrived: a greasy sandwich, sizzling bacon. A chocolate shake appeared too. My grandfather winked at me. Earlier that month, a boy in my class had suffered a brain aneurysm and collapsed right in front of me, knocking over my bottle of Elmer’s Glue. That was when my grandfather started picking me up from school. Every Monday.
After we finished eating, we walked down Columbus Avenue. Winter was a breath away. The sun fell low, the Manhattan shadows grew long.
“You know what the visitor’s story reminded me of, Morris?” He pointed to a high-rise across the street. “They built that in the 50s. All of those apartments are the same. Each of those narrow windows is a bathroom. In each bathroom, there’s a toilet. Next to each toilet is a litter box with a cat squatting in it. Stacks upon stacks of toilets and cats, toilets and cats, all the way to space.”
“Did you really see a visitor?” I asked.
“I did. I swear I did.”
He lit a cigar. His long, beige trench coat swayed in the wind. It had been his coat since World War II. He had scavenged it in France, I would one day learn.
I leaned into him, inhaling his cigar smoke. He drew the coat around me, wrapping me up like a newborn, and I closed my eyes. I was eight years old.
“Do you need to be getting home?” he said. “Maybe your mother won’t be angry if we stay out a little while longer.”
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