Difficult Light

One
That night I spent a lot of time awake. Beside me, Sara wasn’t sleeping either. I looked at
her brown shoulders, her back, still slender at fifty-nine, and found solace in her beauty. From
time to time we held hands. In the apartment nobody was sleeping, nobody was talking.
Occasionally someone coughed or went to pee and then went back to bed. Our friends Debrah
and James had come to keep us company and had settled down on a mattress in the living room.
Venus, Jacobo’s girlfriend, had gone to his room to lie down. My sons Jacobo and Pablo had left
two days earlier in a rented van, heading for Chicago. From there, they’d taken a plane to
Portland. At one point I thought I heard the faint sound of Arturo, my youngest son, strumming
his guitar in his room. In the street I could hear the nighttime shouts of the Lower East Side, the
familiar tinkle of breaking bottles. At about three in the morning, two or three Hells Angels
thundered by on their motorcycles from their clubhouse two blocks away. I slept almost four
hours straight, dreamlessly, until I was awakened at seven by the knot of grief in my belly at the
death of my son Jacobo, which we’d scheduled for seven that night, Portland time, ten o’clock in
New York.