Lupton 315
Bounce and Pink and I ride past them all on the way home, the Novartis building, the Swiss phrama workers slicing their time in there with nice watches. Claro, cada día, it’s there on the corner, spindly, glassy and hulking, the black columns like spines or beetled brows, the panes like glasses lenses looking sideways up at a bunsen burner to make sure it’s well lit, the building looking seriously out onto C/ Sardenya like a chemist eyes a beaker.
It’s not at all like Mr. McGregor’s garden but this time of year of cool starts and warm finishes, the kids have most definitely forgotten their coats, and I think, hmm, to look out onto Gran Via and C/ Sardenya with such certainty, like a Swiss chemist. I don’t want to get put in a pie but it looks to be good eating in there. Maybe a job, a carrot, I opine and parry at fate, signal right and Es-cargot, my as yet un burglarized long tail bike and I and Pink in tow, bank right and swoop into Sardenya’s bike lane.
And oh my how they’re acquiring other companies, the Swiss, I still digitally get the papers. Parsley if you’re sick? 12 billion, please.
Perhaps a job Mr. Rabbit? I’m quite fast on a bike and have enough coats to lose one a fortnight, for a little bit.
~~
It’s strange what memories come at night, when the dark is so close. The aquarium blue light from the pool at this Kindred home swap is calm, the pumps lightly churning and barely dimpling the surface of the quavering aquarelle sapphire set in stone, chaise longes stretched out alluringly about it, here and there. I hear new house noises but none of them are my problem, this isn’t my house and will never be, it’s far too carrisimo, this extravagance that the pining quarter zip tech bros have leveraged startup money to bring us. Including for the likes of me, to download the app, verify and account by checking me email, to slip the gate.
Strangely, yes, I remember, not that distantly, standing at the window of Lupton Hall 315. One among many dormers zippered into a steep pitched roof, windows single pane and loose in their putty, drafty because of it, cyclopses soaring over the baseball field. I had wanted to hear the report of a crack of wood, like a bough that can still catch a wind and crack but not break, the sound resonate and full, relatable, true.
But it was all explained to me, one lesson. The student wanted to play guitar but seemed unwilling or unable to commit to two consecutive lessons, inevitably he would cancel by email at the last moment, seemingly called away urgently to a planned baseball game, out of state.
Emergency Baseball Kid, or EBK as he came to be known in my mind, was making a rare appearance for his weekly college credit guitar lesson when I mentioned that I hear their practices, when they’re not out of state. He lit up immediately siring me politely while sitting with his guitar, which he clearly had not held since the last time we met, some weeks prior.
Sir, we don’t use wooden bats on the account of ease and durability.
Oh?
Yes sir, metal hits farther and doesn’t break. A wooden bats costs $100 and if it breaks it really can’t be mended.
Well that makes sense.
Also, I caint make practice next week, sir.
You can’t make practice.
No sir, coach said wes to be on the bus no later than 1, to allow for the trip to Bryson City, sir.
Bryson city.
Yessir. It sneaks up on you, it does. The bus.
~
Long after EBK withdrew from his lessons for truancy, I’d stand at the loose fitting cyclops window that gave onto the green carpet of a baseball field, and listen. Not to the crack of $100 bats but the metal plink of aluminum ones, distant like a cooling engine. Surveying there I felt it was a job and a good one, one I felt both driven to do and driven from, administrators chasing me to club me down with their $100,000 bats and a non renewal. Eventually I too withdrew for truancy.
~~
You talk in your sleep in French J tells me one morning. She laughs.
Oh? I hesitate.
I don’t know what your saying? Maybe instructing the children while on the bike?
I don’t doubt it. I laugh.
That same morning, it’s soon time to go, to get back on our bikes, and the kids are asking for gloves now, their little fingers the color of milk from the windchill upon arrival. They so delivered I point Es-Cargo back towards the Swiss beaker, chemists starting to bubble behind the windows, congealing success and money.
I swoop right down Sardenya and then cut through the park, Barcelone Nord swooping over it like an overturned wicker basket. Past the Arc I can smell the castañas roasting already, the women at the stand taming and tending the charcoal, getting ready for the tourists, working for little but something, I, pedaling for nothing.
