We All Sleep in the Same Room by Paul Rome Page A

their hand to their mouth in a gesture of overcome emotion. A man exclaims, It’s a bird! It’s a plane!
    On the subway platform, two twenty-something guys egg him on, Dude, awesome Superman costume. You can totally fly. You have super strength. You can shoot lasers from your eyes. And you get the girl.
    I know I was in school. High school, definitely. It must’ve been getting that invitation to my reunion a few weeks back that got me thinking about it. The date was for sometime near Christmas. Only in the dream, I wasn’t even going to graduate. I had to learn something first to pass a course and be able to graduate. I was hopelessly behind, impossibly confused. I didn’t know what it was I didn’t know.
    Then I’m in the boys’ bathroom. But the walls recede forever. There are no stalls or urinals or sinks. Just tile. Those tiny one-inch by one-inch yellow-brown tiles. The floor is muddy. Black and watery with clumps of sludge. I move forward, barefoot. I’m completely naked. The door is locked. It’s nighttime. I can peer out through a crack. I see the hallway and lockers.
    When I turn back around a woman approaches from the infinite, tiled abyss. It’s Jessie. Except it’s not Jessie. It’s Olga Petrova. Olga, who I’ve never seen and haven’t thought about in weeks. Olga, yes, but physically, it’s Jessie. It’s Jessie’s body, Jessie’s face. Except something’s different about the eyes, which are darker and somehow foreign to me. Her skin is white, almost fluorescent. Olga, you did it, I hear myself say. Olga/Jessie doesn’t say anything, but she keeps walking closer. Closer still. And she’s got this red flowing dress. It’s transparent. And she takes a step closer. I’m terrified. And the dress slides off her shoulders and down her non-existent hips to the floor. She’s now a man. But without genitals. No curves. She’s totally emaciated. I can see straight into her white chest. One more step toward me. I’m up against the filthy wall. She puts her arms around me. Around my neck. She’s a skeleton now. A corpse. I’m screaming. It’s Raina. She’s saying my name. Tom! Tom! Tom!
    This is Bedford Avenue. This is a Rockaway Parkway–bound L Train. The next stop is...
    Ben and I pass a Salvation Army, a hardware store, a pizzeria, a health food shop, an accessories boutique—each festively draped in fake spider webs and other Halloween decorations. With Ben’s pace keeping steady, as opposed to his commonplace manic swing between clumsy dash and slumped over why-did-you-give-away-my-stroller slog, tranquility flows over me.
    I’m relieved. To be with my son. Just the two of us, without Raina. It’s been too long. But that’s okay. Whatever has been is okay. No reason to think backward now. My mind is sailing to the future. There are a million places I want to show Ben. I’ll take him to Astoria, to Wave Hill, to the Greenwood Cemetery, on the Staten Island Ferry, to Rockaway, to the Hudson Valley, and Sleepy Hollow. I’ll teach him about the labor movement and about why it’s important, even when you’re down on individuals, to remain optimistic about mankind. And if he wants to know about something else, I’ll teach him about that, too. If there’s a question that I don’t know an answer to, we’ll look it up. Together.
    Before Bedford leads us to the park there are two adjacent bars, each offering beer from the neighborhood’s own Brooklyn Brewery. Ben skips ahead.
    We enter McCarren Park and break into a steady jog across a barren baseball diamond. Futuristic stadium lights stand tall and alien-looking against the gray-blue sky, the way I imagine the wind-turbines that make the long shadows across the Nebraska prairie. Jessie.
    We reach the playground where Ben tackles the slides. I take a seat on one of the benches, lay Raina’s