Chapter 9 continued - three days after the key is found

Anton, long a lover of technology that can acually improve a life, had with him this little thing that makes your ipod plays through powered speakers, and we took it to a park a few blocks from us. For some reason I got stuck with the job of lugging the bocce set which despite being the cheapest one at the store where I'd bought it the day before was encased in a wooden crate.

Bocce balls of course are all a standard weight.

The last time I took LSD, my brother said, we went out to this restaurant? this hamburger place? And what occured to me is that restaurants are really weird. We're all sitting very very close to each other, but we're not eating together, we're all supposed to ignore each other, even though if I were looking at his mouth, we could be having a conversation at a party.

Yeah, Anton said, if you go with a big group of people you're probably sitting further from your grandma than you are from some stranger, and you're yelling so that she can here you, but that guy can go ahead and talk about his sexual pecadillos and you're just ignoring him.

It's called disattending, I said, where you're all agreeing that someone is ignoring you, it's like in a taxi, you can talk about whatever you want, that guy is always not listening, it's called being a professional disattender, like elevator operators used to be

Cambridge has these mean curbs, granite with sharp angles, high, the kind of thing that'd snap your rim if you tried to bike down it. It's true all over, even in the run-down parts of town, or over in Jamaica Plain, the curbs are sharp and proud. As the four of us tried to move in a group down the brick sidewalk to narrow for even two to walk abreast, I thought about the time I was out here, with Dad, and saw some men fixing a sunken spot in the sidewalk.

I thought it was mad, they were pulling up the bricks with a shovel and revealing that underneath was nothing but a bed of sand. Their solution to the sinking bricks was to pour more sand in underneath until the sidewalk swelled up a little there.

I must have been 20, but still I relied on my father to know the answer, he said that anything else would just freeze during the winter, and that they only had to do it every 10 years or so. The stranges thing was how they weren't treating the whole street or even the whole block, just pulling up the most sunken spot at this moment.