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Central Parkway. There was a roaring whoosh as a plane zeppelined overhead.
    I was ecstatic to be free of the airplane, of its stale dry air, of the small soiled hallways of LaGuardia and those sad plastic baggage carousels. We rolled on solid ground beside the bay. I never liked flying, but I liked the world seen from way up there, the incoming skyline, the blunt slant of the Citigroup Center, and the sterling hubcaps and skyscraping needle of the Chrysler Building. I liked the shipwreck hulk of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, and the concrete sprawl of Queens spreading out from the East River like some elaborate gunmetal carpet. What I didn’t like was the turbulence, the need for airsickness bags. I didn’t like the horror of hollow space between me and what was below, and that some five hundred people died in plane crashes every single year. I had checked before leaving. The odds are maybe not especially good, but actually quite good if it’s your plane that spirals and explodes in the oily Hudson. Manhattan is an island, surrounded by water. People forget this. A sewer stink of sulfur wafted in through the window from the bay.
    Abdullah shouted, “What a smell!” Then back to his conversation.
    I was amazed by his fluid traversal between the two languages. I waited for him to pause and lean forward. “You’re speaking Arabic, right?”
    He said into the earpiece, “Wait a second.” He asked me, “What, you speak Arabic?”
    I said, “I’m just wondering if.”
    “Well because many of the businessmen speak Arabic.” He lowered his window and slammed his hand against his car door, yelling, “Move, you fucker!”
    It was Friday, nearly dusk, and I had only been here in New York for a few minutes but I found the city immediately overwhelming. Sunlight flashed between buildings as if some westward and strobe-bursting ambulance was keeping an exact parallel pace. There must have been a day, one specific day long ago, when I first looked up at the sun and asked out loud, what is that?
    Abdullah laughed. “The traffic is starting! What can I do?”
    I shrugged my shoulders.
    He asked me, “Where are you coming from?”
    “California. I moved there. But I’m from here.” I was back, of course, to see my father. Sarah, the lovely ex-wife, she’d told me he was sick, said he sounded “strange” and something seemed “wrong,” but she always exaggerated. I called him and he eventually relented. Really he was fine, just more tired than usual, and he missed Mom. But there was something about his voice.
    Abdullah said, “California girls!”
    A medium-sized bread truck blared its horn alongside us and briefly slowed, a car length ahead. It was then shot-put forward, barely missing a motorcycle. It screeched to a stop behind a red Buick Regal with T-tops. I imagined loaves of white and wheat, clear plastic packs of hot dog buns scattered between the bumps of back wheel wells.
    “He has no patience!” Abdullah slapped his car door. “You’re going to kill somebody! You want I should stay on the expressway? Too much traffic.”
    Flushing Meadows Park was under the overpass, and I saw the grassy lakes and rusting sci-fi ruins of the 1964 World’s Fair. That version of the future dated pretty badly. Except for maybe the Unisphere (which I happened to like very much), a hollow steel globe tall as a ten-story building. Abdullah and I were emigrants flying through the Milky Way, our cab a slow yellow rocket, and the Earth was out there lonesome, spinning still in the distance. I played Wiffle ball here as a kid, on congregation picnics. So long ago I hardly remembered them, but still they came alive, flashes of light in my mind. Mom, Dad, and me on a yellow picnic sheet, cooking food on a metal grill sticking out of the ground, it smelling like chalk and smoke and soil. Our sheet always a bit removed from the others. A wooden table, a red-checked plastic tablecloth. Watermelon slices in a bowl. Mom talking macramé