Radiomen by Eleanor Lerman

when the children of that time—most of them anyway, not counting me—grew up into monied professionals, they were off to the Caribbean or the Hamptons for their summer fun; some gritty peninsula at the end of Queens was not exactly high on their list of vacation spots. There had been an effort at what was termed “urban renewal” sometime in the 1970s, but that had only resulted in most of the summer bungalows and boarding houses being torn down before the city ran out of money and its planners walked away, having built nothing and leaving behind mile after mile of empty lots, some with the remnants of building foundations looking like jagged concrete teeth rising out of the sandy soil.
    I got off the train at the stop where we had always disembarked, Edgemere Avenue, and found myself on a deserted platform in what felt like the middle of nowhere. The late afternoon sky was like a lead ceiling; the wind off the ocean stung my face and hands with tiny seeds of salt. I went down the stairs, listening to my footsteps clanging on each metal step. There was no one in the booth near the turnstiles, no one in the street below.
    In fact, there was hardly any street at all. What I remembered as a broad sidewalk fronting a strip of stores—a dry goods emporium that sold hats and hair bands and bathing suits; a drugstore with a lunch counter; a small grocery—was now just an array of cracked concrete blocks bordering a vast, weedy lot. The intersecting street ran straight toward the boardwalk and the beach. It used to be crowded with bungalows on one side and multistory boarding houses on the other, but now, all I could see was a kind of flat, sandy plain that had been taken over by tall brown cattails and strewn with broken glass. In some places, clumps of trees had taken root so that what used to be a block of bungalows instead looked like a small forest. It occurred to me that this deserted area was not exactly the safest place to be, but I wasn’t ready to leave yet. After a few moments of looking around and trying to acclimate myself, I started walking up the street toward the boardwalk.
    I walked the length of one block and then another. On either side of me were dense stands of trees, denuded by winter and blackened by damp. Even if spring suddenly forced itself past the cold weather that seemed, this year, to be refusing to give in to the seasonal rotation of the planet, it appeared that these bare branches, buffeted as they were by the wet salt wind blowing off the ocean, were going to have a hard time coming to life. Still looking around, I kept on walking, trying to judge, from memory, exactly where our old boarding house would have stood.
    And then, to my great surprise, there it was: the Sunlite Apartments. At first I was almost willing to believe that what I was seeing was really just a projection of my memory. Maybe I just wanted it to be there and so it was, ready to fade away in the blink of an eye. But I blinked, and it was still there, partially hidden beyond the blackened trees. The slate pavers that used to form a walkway leading from the sidewalk to the building’s front door were long gone but the structure itself, a brick box, five stories high, trimmed with faded wedding-cake fretwork around its broken balconies, still seemed to be at least partially intact. From what I had seen so far, it was the only building for a mile in each direction that was still standing.
    So. Now I was here, in an abandoned neighborhood, on a gray afternoon, with the invisible sun drowning in the ocean as the hour raced toward evening and the wind blew sand down the empty street. But why was I here, what did I want? I felt like I had been on automatic pilot ever since I’d left Ravenette’s loft, drawn to this place by some feeling, some huge, gaping hole that had suddenly opened up inside me that I thought I could fill by coming here. But why? The best I could do was trace my lemming-like journey to this abandoned building