Paul found a poster out with Su Casa's trash. El gato negro, it says, over a painting of a black cat with big yellow eyes. Spiky and hungry looking. Paul is my running brother. We look out for each other. I told him I didn't know what kind of person would want a picture like that hanging on their wall. "Come on man" he said. "Show a little sophistication. It's décor." He rolled it up and slid it back in its plastic tube. He doesn't unroll it much, but has been using it like a sword, a wand. He pokes me in the arm with it when he wants to make a point.

Paul showed me how to get into the Silo Point building. They pulled the plug on the condos before building interior walls, but they poured concrete for the floor. Paul showed me the invisible flap in the sheetrock you can push in and climb through.

I never knew before that rats run in herds, like buffalo or something. Giant flocks come through Silo at night, a sudden moving carpet on the floor: dozens together at a time, a rumble of falling feet. I'm used to it. Rat footfall on cement can sound like heavy rain on window glass. I know this is a stretch, but there are all kinds of things you can ask your brain to do if you need to make things smoother. I know not to bring food with me so they won't bite me while I sleep. They run over and leave me alone and I dream I'm safe and dry in a rainstorm.

There's a cat who hangs around here, a mangy marmalade and white striped cat. So fat his white belly is grey from brushing against street dirt when he walks. Not a hungry cat, this cat, no gato negro. At first I thought he was a pregnant she-cat but then I figured otherwise from watching him a while. He lives well. He likes to hang behind the Whistling Oyster. I see him motionless on his haunches hunting rats, and he gets into the dumpster too. It must be a smorgasboard of buffalo wings and burgers in there. On top of that, there's the old lady who feeds the pigeons. She brings tins of Fancy Feast for this cat. She wants him to come eat at her feet, like they do, pecking at her shoelaces. She'll peel back the lid and make kissy noises over her shoulder at him while she's tearing off bread bits and throwing them to the birds, but he doesn't go near the food until she's gone. She comes back next day and replaces the old ones with new. She gathers up his empties and throws them away. He is not as cagey as he lets on. He's got her trained. She's like his waitress. But look, she seems happy enough.

Mornings I like to sit in the Daily Grind. I won't beg like Paul, but if when I get here someone has left a cup with coffee still in it, or the bottom half of a muffin, I'll take it. Everyone here is busy with their computers or their books. I like to sit at a table and read left-behind newspapers. I just sit and listen.

"I am just awash," I once heard one of the artsy-fartsies say, a white woman with yarn-wrapped dreadlocks, one in front with a little silver bell tied to the end. It kept hitting and tinkling against the edge of her jaw. She'd swing her head to keep it back, without taking her hands off her mug, her body moving in slow half circles. Her hair made me think of that snake woman, Medusa. "I'm just so full of feelings for it," she said to the man she was sitting with. His back was to me. He had on a tweed jacket. They looked like a mismatch to me, but with the artsy-fartsies you never know. He could have been anybody. I couldn't make out what she was talking about. I sat back and thought about what feelings I might be just awash with, and then once they came I tried to push them back. I left Medusa and Tweed at the Grind and went looking for Paul. We pooled our resources and bought a quart of Old Irish Rose and drank it down at the end of the pier. I watched sunlight shatter on the water and drank until I was back to comfortable.

Paul can pass himself off into all different crowds. He blends. He hangs out with the Mexicans waiting on Eastern in front of the dirty movie theater for day work. They get kicks from teaching him words in Spanish. Paul's a black man, and some of their skins are dark as his, so if you walked past you might assume he was another Mexican. When I find him there he draws me in, claps me on the back. They nod and pass the bottle if there's one being passed.

I envy Paul how easy he is with everyone. He can stand at President and Lombard with a sign and rake it in, reading the faces of people as they roll to a stop at the light. I've seen him do this, somber and decrepit for one car, God Bless this God Bless that, and then be all smiles and flirt for another. It's a skill he has. I couldn't do it. I am not easy with people. And I'd be afraid to see someone I used to know. It's been a long time, but I'm from here. I grew up around the corner. I knew people. People knew me.

I don't know if this old woman can stand up or not. If I'm close enough when she passes, I can hear the whir of her chair going like a big electric bug. She came through the park when I was sitting by the fountain I used to like to go to. I was just watching the girl in the middle pour water over her stone shoulders and this woman wheeled her chair over and clamped down her brake lever and parked next to my bench. It was drizzling a little. She had a blue plastic bag around her head like a shower cap, tied in a knot at the top of her forehead. "You'll catch chill sitting out in this," she said, staring into the fountain, then up into the sky, squinting into the mist. She could have been talking to the girl in the fountain, or to God, but I knew she was talking to me. There was no one else around.

"I'm fine," I said.

"Hm," she answered, not buying it. Looked at me. Light blue eyes the color of the sky in a wrinkled old face. She pulled a liter of Tropicana lemonade from a bag dangling on her handle. She undid the top and had a long gulp. She was some sight with a plastic bag on her head, drinking right from the bottle. She pulled a hanky from her sleeve like a magic trick and wiped her mouth with it.

"Have some?" she asked, bottle extended. Her arm was trembly.

I said no thanks and smiled polite. She was rattling me. I got the feeling she'd been watching me, that she knew who I was. I don't like being noticed. We sat around another few minutes before she said anything else.

"All right then," she said, screwing the top back on and sliding the lemonade back in the bag behind her. "Take care now," she said, letting up her brake and rolling away.

I haven't been back since. Gave me the willies to have someone come up on me like that. I am not tooling around for friends or charity.

Father Arnold at St. Vince's keeps a bin of blankets and clothes from people in his congregation. I hate to use these things. I hate to sleep at his shelter. Hate it. When I go it alone finding my own places to sleep, I might have to cope with the rats, and with fear, but I feel free and not beholden. When I stay places like St. Vince's there are reminders everywhere of what group of people I belong to now. That woman in the wheelchair could see it straight away. I know. Offering me that lemonade. Hell.

And the junkies. They are all the same, and they are all disgusting. I drink, but mine is regular drinking. My drinking is practically healthy. These people are something different. I hate that people look at me and think I'm one of them.

One of the walls of the Living Classrooms building, way down the end of Thames Street, is all glass, so you can see the people moving around inside on all the floors. Yellow busloads of black and Spanish kids get delivered inside the gate. They pour out of the buses hollering and running around before they are herded into lines to go look at outdoorsy things, the bay and the boats and birds. There is a tower they've got with a telescope. They take the kids up three at a time to look out at the horizon. I'd love to have a look out that telescope to see what I could see, but they lock up the tower at the end of the day.

Right before the building is an island patch of land jutting out from the bay wall. It's the length and width of two or three rowhouses, but nothing has ever been built on it, and it's covered in soft looking grasses. In the spring, there are dandelions, the yellow ones and the see-through gray ones you blow for wishes. When I sit on the bench across the water, wishers drift over and stick to my clothes.

The only way to reach this land I'm talking about would be to go down the iron rungs in the concrete and then make the leap of about three feet over onto the muddy tongue sticking from it. You would have to hop through this mud to reach the grassy land with the dandelions.

When I was a kid my mother would walk to pick me up from school. On the way home we'd pick wishers wherever we saw them, from cracks in the sidewalk, and the edges of people's lawns the lawnmower hadn't reached. We'd take turns wishing on them. Eyes closed, deep breath, blow. The rule was the same as for candles on birthday cake. Don't tell your wish, and it'll come true. I'd blow mine out and keep my eyes squinched closed to cement my wishes. We left a trail of gray fuzzies floating behind us. I was just a kid then. My mom died almost fifteen years ago. Time is nuts. It hides while it's getting the hell away from you. I try not to think about it, because it makes me feel like I am melting into nothing, floating off like blown fuzz.

I'd like to get over there sometime. I'd like to lay down in the grass and look up at the sky. I'd like to blow a dandelion. It looks like a world apart over there on that little island jutting into the water, a kind of wilderness right under our noses.

I'm going to bring Paul over there with me. It will surprise him to hear the idea coming from yours truly. I am not your typical go-to adventure guy.

A boat washed in with the hurricane five years ago. No one has ever come looking for it. The city has never bothered trying to unwedge it from under the marina wall. Its sail is still tied up, but if you were to undo the knot, it would fall down on the deck in clotted pieces. The fiberglass is mottled like an old bone. It's not my favorite place to sleep. It's pitch black inside at night. Anyone could come on board and then I'd be stuck. There's just the opening with the ladder down, no back door or anything. When I'm inside I listen to other boats motor in and out of their slips. Noise and distance are tricky on the water. I can't tell how far away or close to me voices are.

I am always dreaming of the storm the boat washed in from. Right before the worst of it hit and everyone was gone but a camera news van, I slipped the lock on the Bay Café's side door and waited it out on top of the bar with a bottle of vodka I'd brought in with me. I could've drunk something of theirs, something nice, some Johnnie Walker, this thought occured to me later.

Soon I was watching walls of water hit the windows. Water flooded up to the second rung of the bar stools. It was so dark I could only see the shape of the water right before it hit the windows, and then again when it broke into millions of glittering pieces and fell away. The windows groaned and flexed but never caved in. I kept expecting them to, kept bracing myself for it.

Sometimes in my dreams they do break, and a giant wall of water embedded with glass comes at me, sucks me out into the dark bay, and no one knows where I am. No one will come looking for me.

The rats at Silo Point, the thing about them is that in my head, they have replaced the rain. When it rains for real, when it comes down hard on the roof, my brain doesn't know what to make of it. Because then the rats are just rats, plain and simple. And I can't hear their footfall when it's raining, what direction the herd is running from. Before I know it, they are running over me, and I never even heard them coming. And I get jumpy when it rains now, even when I'm not at Silo.

Rats are rain and rain is rats.

My head and its tricks.

I'm getting too old for this.

Sometimes when I think I'm losing it, I close my eyes and pretend I am walking down the ladder and across the muddy patch and over to the middle of that dandelion island in front of the Living Classrooms building. I imagine myself sitting there on a nice warm day, with the sun on my face, looking out at the water and wishing on dandelions. The way I imagine it, it never gets dark. I never need to worry about getting somewhere to sleep for the night. It is just a timeless place with sunshine. This sort of thought will get me through rough patches.

Paul found a piece of schoolpaper blowing around behind El Christo Rey. He collects everything. There is no telling what particular thing will catch his eye on a given day.

I was sitting on my bench in front of dandelion island when he got back. He lit two cigarettes and passed me one. I sat and smoked and looked out at the water while Paul read over this paper, nodding and making interested noises. It was Monday morning and the trash skimmer was dragging its net through the harbor. "Alliteration" he said. "Always knew what that was, I just didn't have the word for it. Cigarette, skimmer, sock," he said. "Sock, sink. Trash, toilet," he said. "Come on you try it, man."

"Man, mooch, muffin, me," I said. "Alliteration, albatross, ass, asshole," I said.

Paul laughed. "That's the idea buddy," he said. I could have kept going and going, the words peeling out of me like from some great giant dictionary in my head I'd forgotten about.

You can hear it from a block away, Paul's laugh, and it'll make you smile just to hear it. His laugh sounds like he is trying to grab up all the air around him to put into it. He will clap his hands, his knees, stomp his feet, first one then the other, bang his poster tube on something. He makes a spectacle of himself. His laughter can make him sound frantic and desperate, though I don't know how to explain this.

We don't talk about our lives. We don't talk about what was before we were here.

The square in Fells Point is where cargo ships came into port with slaves. They sold them on a block in the middle. I sit and try to listen for echoes of them. My mother believed in ghosts. She and my father had an agreement that when one died, the other would come and give the living one a tap on the shoulder. He was always tap tapping her. We'd be sitting watching television and she'd say, out of the blue, "Your father's here. Hi Henry." I would hear her in the next room, suddenly talking to him. I am named for my father. I am Henry Junior. I don't remember Henry Senior. He died when I was in diapers. I used to wonder if my mother would tap me on my shoulder after she died, but a year or two went by after her funeral and I gave up waiting. I figure we never had an agreement like she and my father did, so oh well. I like the idea of it. I like the idea of that connection—that there's something more to life I don't know about yet.

The auction block was dismantled a long time ago, but the shape of it in the cobblestones is still here, the stones a lighter color. Paul showed me this. Sure enough, he's right. In the dark, people trip over the lip of it. During the day, little kids find it and they walk its perimeter like a balance beam, little feet dipping in and out of the ledge. I know those slaves are still here, in the bricks, in the air, under the dock. I wonder if they are running around tapping anyone's shoulders. It makes me feel less lonely to think of them. I'd imagine they probably felt as invisible as I do around here. When people look straight at me it's only a few ways. Some people get tight and nervous. Some of them look at me like I did something awful, men mostly, like I've got a hell-of-a-lot of nerve to be sitting on a bench minding my own business. Some people look sorrowful and sad, mostly women. Rarely do they meet my eyes and smile, just to say good afternoon, top of the morning to you.

I know it was horrible, slavery, but at least the slaves knew what boat they were in, if you'll forgive the expression. It was us against them for them. I don't have an us aside from Paul.

A long time ago, I had a sort of girlfriend, Rosalie. She gave me a ride home from work one day, and I took her to Haussner's for dinner the next Friday and bought her a rose from the Arab with his flat basket of red roses stacked in a pyramid. Roses. Roses. Roses for the lady, the Arab would murmur to couples leaving. I appreciated the way he didn't make this a question, a sales pitch, just an announcement of his presence, no pressure. Roses for the lady if you wanted them. Now the Arab's son has taken over and he's pushy about it. Follows couples down the street: beautiful rose for a beautiful lady, come on, come on, just three dollars, look at these beautiful roses. He shames men into buying them for their women. His father never would have done a thing like that. Hardly even looked you in the eye while he was murmuring about his roses.

On our Friday nights at Haussner's Rosalie would have crabcakes and I'd have steak, but we always looked at our menus first, like we might be considering something different. I'd have a drink or two, never three. She was a Christian, didn't drink, but didn't pass judgment either. Our dates were the upshot of my week. It was nice to be with someone besides my mother.

It all fell to pieces when my mom died. I drank and drank. My story is the same story as lots of guys I've met and it embarrases me in its predictability. This is why I'd rather not talk to people. I don't like having to give any version of life story for people to think they recognize just because it's like one they've heard before. This kind of moment gets under my skin in the most awful way I can't shake.

I still saw the Arab around for a long time after Rosalie and I'd stopped seeing each other, after my mother died and I lost the apartment. We'd nod. He did rounds down here in Fells Point for a long while after Haussner's closed, before his son took over. He'd nod at me and I'd nod back. I appreciated his nods very much. He was nodding at the man I was before, a man to man nod. I'd bought Rosalie a rose every Friday night for a long while, and he knew that part of me, back when I could hold my head up, and he wouldn't meet my eye with his tray of roses.

In the mornings sometimes now, the square is strewn like God played Pick-Up-Stix with flowers overnight. The Arab's son is pushy, but he sure gets those flowers sold. People buy them when they are drunk and then sit down in the square, then forget them when they get up.

I feel so lonely sometimes that I ache of it. I watch couples at night walking into and out of restaurants, pretty women laughing and going tippy-toe so their heels don't get stuck in the cracks between the cobblestones. I eat their forgotten doggy bags and imagine how they must have felt when they were eating the same meal, thinking like it could be a pill I could take, that their togetherness could be some kind of contagious. I watch tourist families and their kids eating snow cones in the square, taking pictures of each other in front of the water, sunlight resting on their faces and shoulders, smiles frozen until the flash catches them. Watching these people sometimes cuts me through with a pain as real and throbbing as a toothache, and look, people die of toothaches.

The sunlight is warm on my face. We turn backward, me first, then Paul, and lower down the iron rungs. We hop skip over to the mud tongue leading to dandelion island. I go first. It is not slippery. I'd thought it would be slippery, all the times I've imagined doing this in my head. But the mud actually slurps up my feet and anchors them, holds them in like they belong here. Paul tucks gato negro into the back of his pants and follows.

We walk over the mud to the grassy part where the dandelions are. They are big as microphones, bigger than I thought when I was seeing them from across the water. Dinosaur dandelions. I try to pluck one, but it won't give. I have to bend and twist it at the stem before it breaks off.

Paul heads to the far end while I work at the dandelion. He's standing with one hand on his hip and the other resting on el gato negro like a cane. He's looking proprietary, his chin in the air, like an explorer taking in the view from newly discovered territory: Amerigo Vespucci. Christopher Columbus. Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner in Baltimore. He was being held hostage on a British ship watching Fort McHenry get blasted. My mother was proud of this. She always found a way to work it into conversations. But so what? I always wanted to say. What's so great about writing some song if you can't keep yourself from being held prisoner?

When I get over to the other side, Paul's taken off his boots and is dangling his bare feet over the edge of the concrete girder like a kid. Nothing in front of us but the big sparkling harbor. I lower myself next to him and he passes me the bottle. The brandy lights me up at the first sip. I've not eaten today and it begins to flush the creakiness from me. When I put it to my mouth again the glass feels like a cool nipple on my tongue. The muscles in my face ease. I hand the bottle back to Paul and twirl the stem of my giant dandelion between my palms. It begins to give off liquid that cools my hands.

A water taxi approaches, its motor churning, blue roof-ruffle flapping in the breeze. A young black couple sits in the back with her right arm and his left roped over the back of their seats to keep the little boy between them from going over. He is closely and carefully held and hemmed in, but he has enough room to squirm and play. He twirls and chirps between their arms. Paul waves to him. "Hey kiddo," he yells, just as they pass by, not five feet away.

The boy cranes his neck to stare at us. He is wearing a brand new Orioles hat, the bill jackolantern orange against the royal blue sun ruffle and the clear, cloudless sky. He freezes, then squeals, jumps up and down. He yanks off his hat with both hands and leans it over the side with his arms, showing us his hat, this is what he's doing, I realize. I am afraid he will drop it. "Wow," Paul hollers over the noise of the motor, holding his hands in the air toward the boy like he's waiting for a hug, "That's some nice hat you got there!" They are about fifteen feet away now. The man and woman turn too. The woman looks for a moment at us and then at her boy. She smiles and laughs, and looks back at us. They are getting farther away and I can't make out their features anymore, but I see the mother's smile, her delight, her son's joy contagious. The boy squeals and flaps his hat up and down at us like a beacon, waves it like a flag.

You have to understand how lonely I am.

You have to understand no one talks to me, or waves at me like this.

This boy is reaching out his arms with everything in him, to show us his hat.

It is not a tap on my shoulder, but this waving boy feels something like what I'd imagine a ghost tap would feel like. My eyes blur with tears, but Paul doesn't notice. He's delighted. He's playing peekabo now. But this boy is too old for peekabo. Even I can see that. Paul is playing this game with skill and flourish. I can see that he is playing it for some child he's known, a ghost, a memory child. The boy in the boat is a stand-in. I look at the side of his face. He is somewhere else, away from here.

The taxi is about to round the bend toward Fort McHenry, thirty feet off now. The father takes the hat from the boy's hands and smooths it onto his little round head and straightens the bill. He puts his hand to his forehead at me and Paul in a casual salute. A gold bracelet slides down his wrist as he does this, and catches the sunlight, throws a spark of light at us. The mother leans to say something to her son: say bie bie, or give those men a wave, or okay, that's enough now, I imagine I can hear her voice, and the boy waves with both hands, then puts them on top of his head to feel his hat safely anchored there. Then they are gone around the corner, the noise of their motor fading into the background until it's indistinguishable from the sound of music spilling from the Whistling Oyster and onto the sidewalk, dribbling onto the water and then gathering speed and steam, the echoes of it reaching us; from the sound of a wolf whistle somewhere near the square, cutting over the auction block; from the noise of the ice blender grinding out snowcones; from the Arab's son, hollering about the beautiful day and his beautiful roses; from my breath; from Paul's.

We don't say anything, me and Paul. I feel like the kid tied us up into the world of the living for a minute. I feel like he saw us, and wanted to show us his hat, and his parents saw him showing off his hat, and we're all smiling, and they are going around the corner, all tied to each other, and maybe tied in some small part to us, and that maybe I'll tap that kid on the shoulder someday. And the whole thing didn't take longer than a minute.

I hand Paul my dandelion. He looks at it in his hands like something foreign.

"What's this?" he says. "I look like I want your weeds?" But he takes it anyway, studies it as he tends to study the things he comes across in one way or another.

"That's exactly what you look like," I tell him. "You ever see a dandelion that big?"

He appraises.

"What'd you go worrying it like this for?" he says, holding it pinched between two fingers in the air above his head, peering up into the pieces of stem that I rolled apart in my hands.

I don't answer. He looks at it for another minute and blows into the blossom. Some wishers float out, lit by sunlight, soft and light like giant motes of dust. But this dandelion is so big that some of the wishers have resisted Paul's breath and stay lodged in the center piece, now half bald and pitiful looking.

"Look at that," he says. "You're right Henry. Big honking dandelion you've got." He drops it into the water at our feet. It floats not out to the bay, but backward, and butts itself up against a floe of trash, against a McDonalds cup knotted up in a white plastic bag with THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU on the side in red lettering. These are the things that don't sink, the things the trash skimmer misses, edging them off to the side to get at the middle.

I think to myself the word-wishwishwishwishwish-remembering blowing out dandelions with my mother, and the thought courses through me like liquor on an empty stomach. It is a nice thought. It feels good.