Knees sore. Shouldn’t try and do that. A bridge, a girl, a drop to the boat. Cowboy theatrics. Passing girl: “Aren’t you even going to say ‘High-ho, Silver?’”And now, the shipping forecast.

Leaves with red-fringe lining: a puckered lipstick fall. And they retreat, rubbed off by the night and the eventual threat of over-inquisitive birds – i.e., “Where did you get that from? Can I put it in a nest?”

15,000 people in the UK live on boats — schooners, Norfolk wherries, Friendship sloops, Nordlands, and folded paper napkins held up against the backdrop of any boardwalk at any point on this planet. Crocus Jones — a barrister who used to go in for the jazz at The Wenlock Arms before returning to his candles and open books upon the water — is the only one I know who has multiple “Library Boats,” though, canal-styled forty-footers filled with books he can walk into and settle into for a solid evening’s browse. He was kind enough to rent one out to me as a place to stay.

I’d come from a flat share on Cairns Street up in Liverpool — I always got a kick out of imagining Gormley’s sea-staring statutes breaking into a slow trot and heading into the waves — but London — well, not only do I have a soft spot in my heart that picks its head up off the desk and begins barking out Em to Fadd#11/E at any mention of the city’s name (or any basic E Maj. to F formation on a guitar’s neck), but Beykoz was elsewhere and my job and fellow youth was here and I kept thinking a giant boot hovered overhead not knowing that a sneak-attack of strawberries and pumpkins and apple and olive trees were set to be thrown up at a moment’s notice.

My current job has me at a hotel. Every morning I go upstairs and change the linens for a failed escapologist who always manages to find a way to trap himself in a different part of the bed and its frame every night. I regularly knock and enter to see a pair of feet sticking up from the center of the bed and be hit by the booming question, “Guess where I am today?” And when that’s finished, I go and clean up the extra clothes all the other guests have left behind after they’ve gone.

George — that’s my boss — often got on the phone, the blower, the vocal-based texting machine, and he tried to track them down, the errant guests represented behind the desk by little push-pins filling up a collection of scotch-taped maps in the squeeze of the reception area, but when he was unsuccessful, he said, “Rauf, why don’t you and your brother go bring these clothes over to the shop?” — the charity shop, the Salvation Army — and my brother would shout something like, “I want a blood sausage!” and George would balk and say, “You what?” and my brother would reply, breathlessly, “It’s when you eat another sausage in revenge” and I would apologize and lead the scamp, the heavyweight champion of the world — even though he’s only seventy pounds — out the door.

The master of transitioning from off-stage to the stage — that was my brother, and he was waiting for my visit. Down into the ship I went, rubbing my knees, sliding past shelf after angled shelf — the Spinozas, the jazz memoirs, Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City,” a stack of Redwall and Hitchhiker books for my little brother, along with all the Keloğlan Tales, Kemalettin Tuğcu, Nasreddin Hodja, and old mimeographs of Mumeyyiz he could stand.

The shirts: an extended clothesline: the peace of the backyard as a roving telescope. Red and green and wear-it-on-your-head-to-church blue. The slowly squeaking wheel moved from Bromley to Barnsbury Street and the thick of King’s Cross.

“What’s going steady mean?”

“Why? Someone ask you to go steady?”

“Some girl gave me a bracelet the other day and said she wanted to go steady. I didn’t know what it meant.”

“Well,” I said. “Aren’t you a lightning strike of manhood?”

He verbalized the end of the thought with a “Kapow!” and a crackle.

“What do you think you should say to her? Or any girl?”

“Hmm?”

“If you say no to this girl and want to try and talk to someone else, what would you say?”

He bit his lip and looked up from the bed to the white enamel resting above.

“What’s bone structure like yours doing in a Walmart-fest like this?”

“No! I – No. No. How did – where did you even learn that?”

Books were the jellyfish of the moment and flitted across the cabin’s expanse. I told him the story about how all the extra words Eskimos had for “snow” was merely a secret code to plot out world domination, which sent him into a fit of giggles.

“I feel invincible right now. I feel like you could shoot Penn and Teller at me and I’d probably catch them both in my mouth.”

“Like a disease?”

“Yes, loving brother. Like a disease.”

And though it and the story were nothing of consequence, I still thought I heard someone strike a piano chord at the end of a hall — the way someone shuffles past a Steinway, rests a cup on the top, hits a chord, looks off into the corner of the room (“Was that right?”), picks up the cup, and goes after the rest of their day.

  11:01 pm  |   March 10 2011   |  25 notes