The blacks getting off the #55 bus at Stemmers Run and Old Eastern look at me like I am insane as they pack up into protective groups and wait for cabs, busses and hacks. People no longer walk down Old Eastern Avenue through the park at night.

I can’t wait.

The night is my chance to sample the world I was designed for, a chance to escape the world that was designed to contain me, a chance to be a phantom.

The moon has risen from the east, as big as the sun, brighter than any feeble streetlight—a silver mirror in the clear night.

A half mile away, on the west side of the park, I see the bus I should have taken rolling like a toy up Eastern Boulevard.

Halfway to Middle River, across from the flooded wood, I pass two men smoking cigarettes outside Shultz’s crab house.

The Commodore has three cars parked before it on this uneventful Wednesday night.

Four motorcyclists chat outside the 7-Eleven.

The insane fat woman does not brood on a bench among her bags in the figure-eight park that borders the river.

I can smell the poplars on the bank, the gasoline bloated mud below—the cattails that push up from the muck.

The giant gray egret usually stands sentinel below the bridge, keeping one eye on me as I cross beside the rail. This tide is higher than he likes. He is absent.

Beneath the deep blue sky and the glaring moon the river widens from fifty feet to a quarter mile. The new condos of the lamp-lit marina on the far bank loom like so many pointy-topped white masks.

Along the banks and above the central bar, in water merely knee deep, dozens of tiny twin mirrors reflect the beaming moonlight, the surface rippling behind them in a serpentine duck-wake as they move at the pace of a strolling man.

What are they?

The points of light are all arranged in pairs, mere inches apart.

One approaches, faster than the others. A flattish muskrat emerges from the inky water onto a large gray rock just where the river seeps from the marsh beneath the observer. He turns his head warily, notes a larger disturbance snaking towards him from behind—two larger, more widely set moon mirrors—then heads across the twenty-foot mouth of the river.

Sliding up from the inky black is a large gray raccoon which looks about, looks up at the observer on the bridge and then disappears under it.

The observer counts 15 more sets of eyes reflecting moonlight from just under the surface of the water, and then realizes that he can only see those looking west away from the waxing moon. The inky, fouled water washing over the polluted mud teams with tiny purpose in the ghostly light.

Nine hours later, the observer re-crosses this same bridge, with the sun rising like a tangle of fire over his left shoulder in the east, hurting his eyes when he turns to regard it. Ahead, the moon greets him on the day-side of its transit, setting like a gray ghost—facing directly at the blazing sun as the observer scurries on his way, wishing somehow that the sun would fail to rise for just one day, and that the moon could hang like an indicting eye over the world of men, softly illuminating his way.