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Henry Kissinger takes his grandson to the Museum of Natural History on a Sunday afternoon. He puts the boy on his right thigh in the subway, and all of the strangers in the car look at the small, blonde boy prodding his own face and pulling his own lips, and some of them smile. Maybe they're thinking about how they used to touch themselves as children and the taste of their fingers, or the way they used to run their fingertips over the hair-speckled expanse of their own skin as adolescents, imagining they are a lover and stroking or being stroked, and how they touched a foreign body this way at some later point. One is me, and I think: that boy looks like I did at that age, before my hair darkened.
 

"You are very special, Dylan," Henry Kissinger whispers, aiming the tip of his tongue for the small black hole in the boy's ear. "You will never be replaced."
 

The boy giggles and squirms away. "Breath tickles," he says.
 

They get out at 81st street and walk down to the museum's main entrance. On the driveway, Dylan trips on a jutting piece of cement, falls, looks confused, and rolls over. The cell phone in Henry's pocket rings, and he reaches in and turns it off as Dylan pulls himself upright on his grandfather's pant leg. A cloud is twisting round the buildings of midtown. Henry looks down, Dylan looks up and considers crying, but doesn't.
 

In the museum the air is clearer, and the two inhale deeply, their backs bent stiffly. Behind them I pause and gasp myself. The crowd flows around them; above them the roof holds, and I follow them into the vast display hall of ocean life. The boy puts a hand over one eye and reaches out a sleek fist to try and stroke the underbelly of the blue whale hanging overhead, his sense of depth perception shut out like the right side of his nose and the microbes living on his eyelashes, now absent. He grunts and whines, frustrated, so Henry takes Dylan by the ankles and props him up higher. Now he stretches and closes his hand on something. When he brings it back and opens it up and smiles, Henry lets him down with two taps on the ground from the boy's sneakers. I read the information cards for the stuffed fish on the walls and try and do anagrams with their names: swordfish, ford swish, catfish, cash fit, mahi-mahi, hah Miami. What if we could take the pieces of these fish and put them together differently and watch them swim away, or walk away, or fly? What if I could take parts of Henry and put them on Dylan, or vice versa, and it could take out the phone and call whoever it wanted?
 

They stop in the hall of evolution and listen to a guide explaining the exhibit. Dylan wanders away and looks at the different humans and monkeys, trying to imitate their positions while Henry listens.
 

"Their descendents were two species," says the guide, "homo sapiens and the Neanderthal, homo neanderthalensis." Dylan puts his hands on his head. "Homo sapiens is, of course, modern man, while the Neanderthal, with his large cranial capacity and less upright stance, did not evolve further, and its line stops in the fossil record around 30,000 years ago."
 

Dylan bends over and drags his knuckles on the ground. "What happens to those kinds of species?" Henry asks.
 

"Well, we think they simply die out because they weren't properly evolved," says the guide.
 

"Maybe when they die, they go to a place where they are useful," Henry counters. "Did anyone ever think of that?" Dylan raises his arms threateningly in the air. From a little ways behind him, I watch the muscles in the back of his neck.
 

They stop for a snack on the second floor, and Henry flips open his phone. He opens it and closes it a few times, and then he turns it on and looks at the screen, and then he presses a button and holds it to his ear. I listen to the conversation while I eat my bag of peanuts and he seems to be talking to someone he knows well. "No," he says, "I have nothing to tell you right now...No. I don't want to get involved yet. What am I doing?" He looks at Dylan. I look at Dylan. "I'm taking my grandson to the museum." I keep looking at Dylan. I want to spirit him away, go feed him ice cream and play video games with him and tuck him into bed.
 

Dylan loves the hall of dinosaurs. I can see it in his eyes: like all of us, he wants to slide down those backbones, but unlike most of us, he might actually do it. Henry just seems sad, like these old things make him weak. By the stegosaurus, two men are talking. "I hear the troops are being moved today," he says. "I hear they're moving in the CIA," he says. Henry looks away like he's been wounded, and notices Dylan trying to clamor over one of the plastic barriers. Wrestling him to the ground and tickling his belly, he seems to remember himself a little as his grandson giggles and squirms. Henry Kissinger helps Dylan up and takes him by the hand as they walk away from those old bones.
 

Finally they take in the planetarium, where they watch a film where celebrities talk about the mysteries of science. The exit ramp is supposed to represent the lifespan of the known universe, and it seems too short. Dylan stops at the end and reads the sign, and Henry watches as his grandson spreads his thumb and forefinger on the dirty metal surface, trying to measure out his lifespan, short even in human terms. Henry thinks, It doesn't matter so much in the end, then, after all.
 

The two are outside, and the cloud has dissipated somewhat. Everywhere, people still stumble, though, trip and run into trees and lightposts. ^[1] Henry and the boy ignore them, and each picks handfuls of grass from the wide lawn in front of the museum. I do too, but as they put the grass in each other's hair, I have no one to do it to but myself. Which is fine with me.
 

We three part. And one day, I think, will our bones, then, be side-by-side?
 

j_moody: surreal. at this point, it is still disjointed, or in its fetal stage-- limbs not fully formed-- but there is great potential here. i like the second to last paragraph with the grass in the hair and bumping into lightposts. it gives a sort-of south american surrealism to the piece-- that kind of device could be employed more often throughout the piece to bump it into its own separate fantastical reality. Add comment