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Liz—what not even Milt knew or my sister—that it was Mexico Umo had come to because it had been his grandfather’s dream? “ Mex ico!”
    Liz puckered up, she made a beautiful face. “Why do we do that?” I said. “Other people’s dreams,” I said, in momentary possession of someone else’s private memory but only from outside—Liz would never to her credit just say, Yeah . “It’s not Mexico he wants,” said my girlfriend. I got a kiss on the shoulder. How’re you doing? was one of her thoughts said softly now standing hip-deep in my lane, afternoon tiny bubbles racing up from somewhere, her clear dreamy thigh, an escaped coil of hair at the seam of flesh and suit, whichever came first.
    If she wanted to know, though I wasn’t about to say, it had been two years ago and three days after the accident, standing in the water here with Liz, I felt again before I’d even known her, the Goldthread herbs I had crushed and boiled and quite secretly with my sister applied the terrible night in her room when the door was flung open upon us like a snapshot by our father though we were the flash, yet time after time in mere memory another place of that time I was in a sweat arguing about nothing with Milt at The Inventor’s, and to the third person nearby could it have sounded set off by some For Sale thing on a shelf?—I was injured—not just injured—ill, sick, I had realized at that moment or changed (how the word has changed, was it a war to make “ill” mean “wonderful”?)—and the angry track the accident had raised on my chest only days ago was mine alone. Milt had hold of the early west Bengali biplane, swooping it this way and that, the fuselage orange and crimson, the top wing pocked with tiny dark marks as of anti-aircraft bursts The Inventor had said were drawings of sea pencils in fact that thrive on the marine reefs to the south off Sri Lanka, the plane designed and built by an oceanographer from Calcutta and these very tweezers lying on the shelf were the ones used to place and glue the balsa struts. (“Let the tool do the work,” I said. Milt flicked his finger at a poster of a woman looking at you over her shoulder showing a beautiful ass and just visible the thong top of her underwear, it was odd but I didn’t know how much if any experience Milt had had). Brought back from a mysterious unannounced trip abroad of The Inventor’s months before, the plane model cost only twenty-five dollars, but who had that kind of money? It was Milt’s sixteenth birthday, not enough to make me agree with everything he said today. “You’ll get over it, you’ll dive,” he’d said. “Why should I get over it? I can hardly breathe.” The injury to my chest was mine, and The Inventor was puttering in the far room, listening. I heard Milt talking to himself or to the plane behind me, for then I was standing in front of The Inventor counting my money and put it back in my pocket and lifted my sweatshirt to show him. “They said I was lucky.” “It needs to heal, then you will be better than never you knew,” he said.
    â€œThan ever?”
    The right words will do more had been nonetheless what The Inventor had said when I told him what had happened and that I couldn’t breathe, and when he laughed learnedly, sketchy, even forlorn, and asked how it had happened, the full twist that came too close to the board, I couldn’t breathe again and he lowered his voice and he said that worrds had caused the hurt and would do more than the herb to fix it but try the herb, and it made me mad but it was scary, this very dark man—had he been at the pool when it happened? He had a total outsider’s hunch—that was it—or weird melting-pot foreign knowledge, yet no, it was some fine-line or species tenderness; for, well, words of criticism had greeted my