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saved. It’s likely she didn’t need saving; she’s probably doing just fine now, whatever that means. She was two years younger, fifteen going on forty. She drank and smoked too much. She would sit on the edge of the subway platform and wait for the train, her legs dangling over the edge.
    My father was gone by then, and she saw me as tragic, someone like her—her father was also gone—and that’s why she liked me. She thought we were all in this mess of a world together. We’d get high on my father’s grave, and I’d find myself telling her that happiness wasn’t as much a bunch of B.S. as she liked to believe. She’d laugh and tell me I was funny, then she’d fall asleep in the cemetery grass, and I’d wake her before dark and walk her to the train.
    She was perfectly named Gail. She’s a passing wind in this story, a gust across the page, here only because she’s part of a pattern in my life, a desire to save, and because she was there the day I tried to walk on water. Not the ocean, but the lake in Central Park, beneath the arch of the Bow Bridge. Pretty wimpy, I know—hardly a test of faith—but it was cold.
    Maybe it’s misleading to say that I tried to walk on water. I didn’t believe I could; in fact, I was certain that I couldn’t. The urge rose up in me suddenly. I said nothing to Gail. I didn’t jump or dive; I walked out of the rowboat and immediately sank. So, the laws of physics worked; they applied to me. This was good news. I swam to the base of the bridge and waited. I was shivering, jumping in place, shaking my arms to get warm. It was an exhilarating fall.

 
    Dear Wile E. Coyote,
    Your problem isn’t Road Runner; your problem isn’t that you can’t walk on air. Your problem is that you don’t believe. You’ve been left in the dust too many times; you’ve been blown up too many times, your coat turned to ash; you’ve been flattened by too many trucks; you’ve failed and failed again, and that’s what you believe.
    You’ve accepted your role as Road Runner’s foil—he gets what he wants, what he already has, freedom and speed and a few more pecks of birdseed set out by you, a trap deep down you know will never work. You know the outcome every time before it arrives; one might say you create it. You will always be thwarted; you will always be chasing, always one step too slow; you will always be hungry.
    Who knows, maybe that’s a good thing—never quite reaching your goal, never quite reaching the finish line, never catching the bird you must believe it’s your fate never to catch. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t eat Road Runner even were you to catch him, wouldn’t even harm him, wouldn’t ruffle a single feather. I’m not sure you’d know what to do with him except set him free, pretend you’d never caught him, and go back to your chasing, the only thing you’ve come to know how to do.
    I tuned in every Saturday morning, hoping—even though I’d already seen every episode—that you might stop chasing Road Runner and let him come to you, that you might start acting as if you’d already caught him, as if you already had everything you could ever want, king of the desert, knock on a cactus and out comes a tall glass of water, a fat steak. I kept hoping just once you wouldn’t look down and see the air beneath you, the fall to come. Or that you’d look but believe anyway that you could fly.
    Â 
    Saturday morning had a feeling; was a feeling. The feeling when I heard the truck, trash can lids crashing onto the ground, the roar of the compactor, the sight of my father pulling up, smoking a cigarette without ever touching it with his hands.
    Spray-painted in red on the side of the truck was an angel smoking a joint. Most of the tags were illegible, but I could make out a few—Curious Feet, Atom Bones, Iz the