Report From the Interior

  It is morning. It has taken me many hours to write you this one-paragraph letter. I am tired beyond belief, but I had to finish. The birds are going wild, an early morning song, ecstatic and abundant. I’m sure it will be a beautiful day. I’ll sleep through it like a child. I wanted to write you a long letter in order to hold your attention for as long as possible. I have written with love and fatigue. I miss you very much. Will you write to me soon?

  Love,

  Paul

  ALBUM

  There was no problem in believing that the man in the moon was an actual man.

  At the same time, it seemed perfectly credible that a cow could jump over the moon. And that a dish could run away with a spoon.

  When someone tried to explain to you that the earth was a sphere, a planet orbiting the sun with eight other planets in something called a solar system, you couldn’t grasp what the older boy was saying.

  Stars, on the other hand, were inexplicable.

  … you are convinced they are real, that these raggedly drawn black-and-white figures are no less alive than you are.

  … squirrels were the animals you admired most—their speed! their death-defying jumps through the branches of the oaks overhead!

  … every year for the twenty-six and a half years that remained of his life, your father spent his summers cultivating tomatoes …

  … low-budget Westerns from the thirties and forties, Hopalong Cassidy, Gabby Hayes, Buster Crabbe … clunky old shoot-’em-ups in which the heroes wore white hats and the villains had black mustaches …

  … the colors felt more vivid than any colors you had seen before, so lustrous, so clear, so intense that your eyes ached.

  … spaceships landed out of the night sky …

  In the face of evil, God was as helpless as the most helpless man …

  … you live in dread of the morning when the cup will slip out of your hand and break.

  … a vast collection of biographies with stark black silhouette illustrations interspersed among the pages of text.

  … games that always ended with a last-second touchdown pass …

  Poe was … too florid and complex a writer for your nine-year-old brain to grasp …

  The following year, you wrote your first poem, directly inspired by Stevenson …

  Holmes and Watson, the dear companions of your solitary hours …

  But best of all, most important of all, the thing that solidified your bond with Edison to the point of profoundest kinship, was the discovery that the man who cut your hair had once been Edison’s personal barber.

  … mock battles in your suburban backyards, pretending to be fighting in Europe (against the Nazis) or on some island in the Pacific (against the Japanese) …

  She began telling you about frostbite, the intolerable cold of the Korean winters and the inadequate boots worn by the American soldiers …

  … inviting Cleveland Browns quarterback Otto Graham … to attend your upcoming birthday party in New Jersey.

  … a short message for the kid …

  … you weren’t sure if you were shaking Whitey Ford’s hand or the hand of someone else.

  What possessed you to attack that old Philco, to eviscerate it and render it useless, to annihilate it?

  The Calumet can was red, you recall, with a splendid portrait of an Indian chief …

  … as if every boy at some point in his childhood were destined to cut down a tree for the pure pleasure of cutting down a tree …

  … but then, of course, George Washington was the father of his country, of your country …

  … this white colonial mansion was the heart of America itself, the very seat of Columbia’s glory …

  Politics was a nasty sport, you now realized, a free-for-all of bitter, unending conflict …

  … the Great Spirit they believed in struck you as a warm and welcoming deity, unlike the vengeful God of your imagination …

  Lone Ranger: Well, Tonto, it looks like we’re surrounded.

  Tonto: What do you mean we?

  The Cold War was in full bloom then …

  … the Red Scare had entered its most poisonous phase …

  … the only noise from the zeitgeist loud enough for you to hear was the bass drum sounding the alarm that the Communists were out to destroy America.

  … the supersonic jets roaring across the blue skies of summer …

  … a flash of silver glinting briefly in the light …

  … the great detonation of blasting air that signified the sound barrier had been broken yet again.

  You never worried that bombs or rockets would fall on you …

  That was fear. Not bombs or a nuclear attack, but polio.

  … your father’s mother, an alien presence who still spoke and read mostly in Yiddish …

  … no Sabbath meals on Friday night, no lighting of candles …

  … the incarnation of a monstrous evil …

  … an anti-human force of global destruction …

  … your dreams were populated by gangs of Nazi infantrymen …

  … and the three notables from the land of baseball (Hank Greenberg, Al Rosen, and Sandy Koufax, who broke in with the Dodgers in 1955), but they were such flagrant exceptions to the norm that they qualified as demographic flukes, mere statistical aberrations.

  George Burns had been Nathan Birnbaum.

  Emanuel Goldenberg was transformed into Edward G. Robinson.

  Hedwig Kiesler was reborn as Hedy Lamarr.

  … studying the principal stories of the Old Testament, most of which horrified you to the core …