by Timothy P. Fenn
Carolyn slowly scanned her eyes over the “body” of the mountaintop, known as the “Sleeping Giant,” and read it from left to right: the chiseled “head,” the shallow “chest,” the two mounds where the “hips” would be, and then the slow slope down from the “knee” to the “feet,” which cut an almost eerily perfect forty-five degree angle down the royal sky. Little brushstrokes of dark green wisped from “his” cliffs like mounds of body hair; “he” lay in a breathtaking autumnal bed, the trees sprayed around him in technicolored reds and golds.
It was warm then, midday, a good twelve degrees hotter than when she’d first arrived at the park from Union Station; she took off her parka, and laid it in a clump on the bench. Glenn was supposed to meet her there an hour ago, but there was still no sign of him.
She checked her phone. Nothing from New York: not from Steve, nor from Harrison. A quick click into Instagram revealed nothing either. There was still time.
“Oh my god, Carolyn?” came a voice from behind her; it was familiar and yet filtered, as if run through a poorly constructed vocoder. It took a moment for her to realize the muffled effect was a result of her earbuds, which she swiped off and shoved into her pocket along with her phone.
Carolyn rose, spun around, and then saw him: Glenn, good old Glenn, Glenn from next door, Glenn from the senior prom, Glenn with his dorky, dumb, wispy, ginger hair and 1980s Thomas Dolby clear plastic synthpop glasses (which, unbeknownst to Glenn, were actually quite stylish at the moment), Glenn with the same hair and in the same MS-DOS-era programmer outfit coming towards her now with…
“Is that a fucking baby?” Carolyn said.
Glenn stopped, and cradled his baby just a little bit, as if protecting it from a dart she’d thrown. Then he laughed. He’d always laughed at her jokes. Good old Glenn, good old always-there-for-you Glenn; he’d laughed even when her joke had no punchline.
“You haven’t changed, Carolyn,” he said.
“Neither have you.”
They stared at each other for a good fifteen minutes, from opposite sides of the bench.
“Should we hug?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said.
They walked around the bench and hugged awkwardly, careful not to smother the baby; it was very short, almost a shoulder pat, really. When it was over, she felt like saying, “Good job, Glenn,” but realized if she did, he’d thank her sincerely. Yuck.
“Well, it’s very nice to see you,” Glenn said. She tried to snag a compliment from him with her eyes, but he didn’t reciprocate. He just looked down at his baby and did that thing people with babies do where they sorta rock it or whatever. It dawned on her that Glenn had probably brought the baby with him on purpose, to behave himself. This was not going to work at all.
“What now?” he said to the baby.
“How about a picture?” she asked. All she needed was a picture.
“Oh, okay,” he said, with that Good Old Glenn laugh, that goobery “a-hut-hut-hut.”
“Great,” Carolyn said. She picked up her phone and started to arrange it on the bench so that its camera framed them in front of the Sleeping Giant. When the timer was set, she took her place, at the cusp of the hill. Glenn sort of hopped over, cradling the baby over his belly, which, to Carolyn, made it look as if the baby was tucked into his belly, like a kangaroo. When he finally stood next to her, he unleashed a smile so dopey she was tempted to smoke it.
The baby rustled.
“Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Glenn,” she said.
“What?” His ginger eyebrows, their hue a perfect cadmium mixture of the trees’ leaves, shot up into concerned arcs.
Carolyn had to think for a second. Anyone who spied the photo would think Glenn was her cousin or something and that the baby was her nephew or whatever.
“Well, it’s just, um,” she said, looking down, and dug the right toe of her crinkly Adidas Samba into the dirt. “You know, I was taking this class, and, uh, you know that the Native Americans, they thought that if someone takes a photograph of you, that it, like, steals your soul.”
“Whoa,” he said. “Yeah, I think I read about that somewhere.”
“Yeah, so, you know, I think that maybe little Leonard there, maybe we should, you know.”
“Leave him on the bench?”
Good old Glenn. Good old always-getting-the-point Glenn.
She nodded.
“Of course,” he said, and with a quick look around to make sure there were no lurking baby snatchers, set the still-sleeping little Leonard on the bench, and then ran over to Carolyn.
“Let’s do this quick,” he said.
“Well that’s kinda your style, isn’t it, Glenn?” Carolyn said. She couldn’t help herself. And good old Glenn didn’t disappoint. He chuckled as they posed, arms around each other, their silly smiles inverted reflections of the Sleeping Giant’s hills behind them. She’d set the camera app so that multiple photos would go off in rapid succession, which allowed her to get just a little closer for each click, to the point where, eventually, her left foot rested atop his, his left knee cradled behind hers. He did not move.
“That it?” he said.
“Yup,” she said, then walked over to the bench, cradled her phone, and began flipping through the photos, trying to find the perfect one to post on Instagram. Of course, it would be that last one, with their knees a-knocking.
“Hey,” Glenn said, “you’re not gonna, like, you know.”
“What?” she asked, still tapping on the phone.
“Like, post that, are you?”
“Post it to what?” she said, just in time for Leonard to start wailing. Glenn ran over topick him up, rocked him and shushed him until the wailing died down, at which point her photo had finally posted on Instagram, there for all thirty-seven of her followers to see.
“I don’t know, like, Facebook or whatever?”
“I was thinking more like Fuckbook, Glenn.”
She didn’t smile right away, didn’t give away the punchline, because she knew–she just knew–that good old Glenn’s face was gonna flush so crimson it’d look like he was sweating blood. Which it did. But then the baby wailed again, followed by more rocking and shushing, and even more wailing, and the wailing was so shrill it flayed her eardrums to the point where she almost screamed “JESUS H. CHRISTMAS SHUT UP,” before Glenn’s baby finally calmed the F down and shut the F up.
“Glenn,” said Carolyn.
“Yeah.”
“I was kidding, Glenn. About the Fuckbook.”
“Oh,” he said, but he didn’t laugh, or chuckle. Now she felt herself go red in the face, as she realized just how lost he was in Baby Town, when he should have been home in Carolyn Town.
“Leonard needs to nap,” Glenn said. “I should take him back home.”
Two hours later, they were sitting in Glenn’s brown 1990s Nissan Lamewagon, which was parked across from Union Station. This was after they’d dropped Leonard off with some woman at Glenn’s house. Not his wife, but a housekeeper or neighbor or babysitter or someone. Someone young but local, and lamely dressed, someone ineffectual, someone easy to ignore. Glenn had run back to the car and asked her if they should go get a drink, and she’d said yes, but only if he bought them a bottle of Old Crow from the liquor store to drink in front of the station, like they used to do in high school. It was one of those big bottles and soon they were a third of the way through it.
“How ‘bout some music?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, and took a swig of Old Crow, looking past the brick facade and the trains and into the power station, where the setting sun was dripping through the system’s rusted, gridded electrical trusses like a cracked yolk through a strainer. As he fiddled with the stereo, she waited for something old to come on, like “their song” or something, some memory grabber. A mixed tape, perhaps. Good old Glenn made her a lot of mixed tapes back in the day.
Instead, it was a CD. Jazz. And not the good kind, that avant-garde bebop Harrison once played as they lit a post-fuck roach in his office. This was the kind of jazz you heard on the Weather Channel, as an ELIZA computer voice announced “your five-day forecast.”
“The fuck is this, Glenn?”
“It’s Lena’s,” he said, and motioned for the bottle. She handed it to him.
“Fits the car, I can tell you that.”
Glenn took a multi-gulp swig, so that the bottle was now half gone, and then shook his head, which flushed red again.
“Whoa,” she said. “Slow your roll, Bluto.”
“I have to ask you something,” he said.
She grabbed the bottle, took a swig, and said, “Shoot.”
Glenn did nothing; he just sat there, doing nothing. Good old Glenn, still in Connecticut, still doing nothing.
“So, what’s the deal with your wife?” Carolyn asked.
“I, um,” he said, closing his eyes, and then—dear Lord—he started to cry. It was a big one too, one of those hunched-over cries, a good old chuck-chuck-chuck into his hands; his back curved into a low arching mound, rising and falling with each chuck. Glenn’s body, in that moment, resembled the Sleeping Giant, like it had come to life and was immediately overwhelmed.
Carolyn used to be good at these types of situations, but years in New York, with a certain type of New York Man, the Steve and Harrison type, had drained her of any impetus she might have had to comfort him. In New York, she’d been Glenn a few times and in that moment she worried she might turn into Glenn just then. She listened to him chuck-chuck-chuck into himself and it was too much; she had to filter it out, so she checked her phone, tapped into Instagram, scrolled, and saw it: a photo of Steve and Harrison, out with some other designers from their firm, lapping it up in one of those dumb retro 1980s Arcade bars in Brooklyn, childish Chuck E. Cheese grins on their dumb, stoned faces. Did they even know about each other? Were they conspiring against her or were they just that fucking stupid?
“I’m sorry,” Glenn wailed. It was the very same wail as Leonard’s.
Her phone buzzed a text from Steve: Where you at?
Carolyn looked away from all of the men, to the window, caught herself in the vehicle’s side mirror, and blinked back at herself.
“Who’s that?” she heard Glenn say, but it was too late, she already had the door open, had her right foot on the curb.
“Oh, just some people I know in the city,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, and sniffled.
There was time. No way she wanted to meet Steve at the bar, with Harrison still there macking on some young wanna-be model or whatever. On that street at the farthest end of the Metro North, there was still a bit of the good old Carolyn left. She didn’t have to be Glenn just yet.
“If I comfort you, do you promise not to cry?” she said.
Glenn nodded.
Carolyn climbed back into the car and hugged him, hard; ran her right hand over his spine softly so that he felt better. He sat up, sniffled and smiled at her dangerously, which was her cue to leave. She crawled back out of the car, shut the door, and watched him blink at her through the glass. It was unseasonably humid that day, and it only took seconds for the windows to fog up and obfuscate Glenn completely, at which point she finally stepped away to catch her train back to New York.
Timothy P. Fenn is a recent graduate of the NYU SPS Humanities Program, with a concentration on creative writing. He currently resides in Astoria.