Nicole Krauss – Long Island

Fiction

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Riding the brakes bumper to bumper down Thirty-fourth Street, at last we cross Second Avenue and our father toes the gas and spins the giant steering wheel, mahogany and fit for a ship, for that’s what this metallic pink-champagne-colored Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham is: an eighteen-and-a-half-foot urban yacht, and the least practical vehicle imaginable for sailing through bankrupt, crimeridden, late-nineteen-seventies New York City. We follow the slight curve of the down ramp until we’re sucked into the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel with a whomp, and the pressure changes as the car descends, the soundscape becomes tamped down, interiorized, like when we jump into the pool and hear the thud of blood in our ears. Kneeling by the window, because there are no seat belts to prevent us, we see the grimy white wall tiles smear past in a dizzying, almost nauseating way; even the light is grimed and fluorescent-dim, flickering to the tune of a seizure.