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baby girl clinging to his chest like a little monkey. His hugely pregnant wife waddling on after him in a wig and a gray ankle-length dress, with two small boys in tow in matching yarmulkes and side curls.
     
    Hoolian fingered his Saint Christopher’s medal and thought of his own father: a widower at thirty-five, stretching a rainbow of expectations over his head, wanting Hoolian to fulfill all the dreams he’d abandoned after he’d dropped out of City College and taken a job as a janitor on the Upper East Side. His father, who read Cervantes and Dickens on the service elevator and carried the poodle ladies’ groceries into their kitchens for Christmas tips. His father, who’d taught him how to caulk a bathtub, pushed him to apply to Columbia on a scholarship, and spoke only English to him at home.
     
    He remembered that last weekend before he went upstate, when his father gathered what was left of the family for a going-away party on Orchard Beach. The Puerto Rican Riveria, Papi called it. Ray Barretto and the Fania All-Stars on the boom box. His tia Miriam bringing a roast pig. His uncles fishing off the rocks with bamboo poles. His cousins from Bayamón playing volleyball. And his father raising a half-empty cerveza at sunset and saying, “To my son, mi hijo. I’ll never stop believing in you, muchacho. I’ll never stop trying to bring you home.”
     
    This was a sorrow beyond dreams. Hoolian found himself seething between his teeth and furiously wiping away tears. Goddamn you, you little maricón . Why’re you crying now? He slammed his fist on the bench beside him, remembering how the warden up in Attica denied him permission to go to Papi’s wake. Motherfuckers never let him be, never gave him one fucking break. He punched the bench again and bit down hard on his lip, knowing such fine-tipped anguish would either lose its edge over time or eventually tear him apart.
     
    The Hasid and his family stared at him gravely.
     
    “ What the fuck are you looking at? ” he said.
     
    At the next stop, they moved to another car.
     
    He folded his arms across his chest and tucked in his chin, not looking up until the train emerged from the long tunnel and rose over the rooftops of Borough Park. So this was how everybody else had been living; clothes on a tenement line, an American flag draped over a balcony, Hollywood Tans next to Manzari Furs, a lone runner on a late-night gym treadmill, and an old couple watching television on a couch. He felt like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, seeing the Statue of Liberty half buried in sand and realizing that the world he once knew was dead.
     
    It was after one in the morning by the time he finally reached Stillwell Avenue, the last stop in the city. The Terminal Hotel was boarded up across the street. He descended the steps and crossed Surf Avenue, looking for a pay phone to call Jessica again. All the Broke-Down Midnight People were out in front of Nathan’s and Popeyes Chicken; the No Particular Place to Be People, the Runaways, the Won’t Go Fars, the Overmedicated and Undermedicated, the Bottom Feeders and the people who hung around them just to have someone to look down on. And, of course, the Moonwalkers like himself: men moving down the sidewalk gingerly, trying not to bump into anyone, apologizing too quickly and looking up at the sky, trying to judge time and distance, and still not quite believing they were finally out.
     
    He felt a breeze coming off the ocean and vaguely recalled there’d been a booth on the boardwalk years ago.
     
    The moon burned an ash-white hole in the black sky. The Wonder Wheel flicked off, spoke by spoke. He walked toward the beach and found it strangely calm and faded gold in the dim lights from Steeplechase Pier. A volleyball net sagged, as if waiting for players to show up. The ocean rolled on—immense, eternal, and indifferent—the thin lip of the tide curling as it reached the shore.
     
    He stood at the railing, trying to