A Matter of Love in da Bronx (23 page)

--You will never see her again! Do you understand!
Do
you
?

--Fuck you, I won't. It's our destiny!

--You had your chance. No chance for instant replay; no chance to replay it differently. Just nothing. What you did is what is done. You fucked up. You live with it! That's all you're getting out of this life, Sam Scopia. Ready to try another? You're only a charity case in this one; you can only improve in the next one.

--Don't you understand if I don't see her again, I'll die?

--Now you got the picture. It's called the moment of maximum educability--your brain can live forever, it's your body that's dead. Ha!

Almost an hour later, nakedness seemed quite appropriate as he sat on the edge of his bed, his chin resting on his breastbone, his hands limp between his legs guarding his privates, his mind untethered itself from body, room, stale air, hushing light, and flew as a tempestuous whirlwind into the trionispheres of past, present and future to seek out the answer. Discarding numerous possibilities, it centered finally on hope. First, the hope of hope that she would be his. --I hope Mary Dolorosso will be mine, I hope. Discarded. Not strong enough. Better a prayer providing some dynamism. --Please, God! Let her be mine! But impetration deprived the foundation of solidity, insinuating impuissance.

So, then, flitting frenetically as a hummingbird from coral bell to coral bell, gasping, straining, urging all, then, finally, he was prepared to resign, to accept unsatisfactory powers, he caught peripherally the shadow form of the Mundificator. He ruled a world with which Sam was not unfamiliar, but which made his flesh crawl as if covered with manylegged tiny creeping things. He didn't understand the reason: Because he came here only when he was terribly frightened, or confounded with a mystery, or heavy with self-imposed responsibility, and that when he came as a child, and lasted until there was no more real innocence to be lost. It was a world of magic which he improvided, where he resolved all fears, all questions, all burdens. Why is dead? --Why is a little boy worried about such things? Dead is not for you! --Aha! But I see the dead man every week! Is that how we get dead? Is that how I will get dead? Then, I must never get dead. My Mummy must never get dead! My Papa must never get dead! Dead means having to be nailed to a cross. Aha! So? Now, my little voyager through this life, bursting frontiers of your world almost every day, how do you combat dead? How do you protect those gods of parents from dead? Dead people are gone. They go. They don't hang around. So? Be dead and stay around.

--I'm dead.

--You are not dead. You are alive.

--How do you know?

--I know.

--Prove it.

--Dead people don't bleed. Stick a pin in your finger. You will bleed.

--Ouch!

--See? You are bleeding.

--Yes, I see. So dead people do bleed.

That would never do, he couldn't go around sticking pins into people to find out if they were which. How do it then, indeed, but by magic! Magic always worked best when you won in a race, any race, just so long as you allowed some small possibility that you might lose inasmuch as you played against yourself, and you invented the game and the rules. --I can get from here to the telephone pole before a car passes me! --I can brush my teeth and scrub my face before the toilet stops filling. --I can count every person in the first two pews before the music stops. Then, there were those things you couldn't do. Everybody knew you weren't supposed to step on a crack or you'd break your mother's back! How about walking down the street with someone and having to go around a person or a pole or something on opposite sides? How about your shoelace becoming undone? Then, there were omens and magic formulas for neutralizing them, like if you dropped your Lucky Aggie, you countered the bad luck by spitting--usually it was always to do with spitting--and then spinning around three times as fast as you could. But, this was all a long time ago and Sam couldn't remember what used to work and what didn't, as well as the fact that the resurrection of such memories was a matter of convenience though not at all conviction. There was some strong reliance on the Mundificator. He could see him. The black man garishly bedecked, the bleached bones reflecting the African moon, which caused him the problem. The Purifier of Evil was called upon by his people to stop the moon from being blotted out. It was moving inexorably right out of the heavens. The penicillins of the day came in the form of a very young woman, who, a few weeks after she was born, had the inside of the lips of her vulva scraped raw and sewed together; then as she got older, she would be circumcised--her clitoris would be nipped--all to assure everyone concerned that the offering was a virgin, indeed. With some small elaboration, and great justification, the mundunugu would slice into the girl and do magical things with her blood-dripping heart, even consuming some of the warm liver, perhaps untangle some of the intestines though she had stopped screaming some time before. No matter. Before long, the blackness would leave the moon, the people would be saved, and the Witchman knew what he was doing, all right. The fact didn't escape Sam. There was only one hair's breadth in a mile that didn't say the Mundificator was so much bullshit. But, it was that microscopic measurement of belief in the magic man's ways that made Sam find a mirror, and set to work. With a razor. And his chest. A bloody mess.

A WRETCHED DEPRESSION, the spissitude of coagulated self-pity, impounded Sam Scopia's brain the next morning like a cataplasmic neoplasia. It was fully developed and in place before the first discernable needlepoint of consciousness broke through the pervious nigritude of an uneasy sleep. It started as a slow, upward drift though unable yet to decode the anomolous signals until he received the message to open his eyes. He found himself unable to do so. His mind rocketflashed in analysis, first, to identify his situation; and, second, to respond with some solution. His head felt as if a lagbolt went from ear to ear anchoring his head to the bedstead. Then, a welling in his chest, a stricture in his throat, and by all damnation! A painful pressure from behind his eyeballs which were aching for relief from a roiling sea of tears. What? Mystery of mystery! Whereof doth this arise? As discomforting as it all was, what an exciting new experience! He forced himself to waken fully. Everything intensified. He eased his eyelids until he caught the startling, filtered oozy grayness of morning's first light. So? He hadn't died. But what was that feeling? Electrified, his eyes opened wide signaling his own recognition of his precarious status, and then closed again. Somewhere from within the depths of his body he understood primarily one thing: He couldn't allow the tears to flow. Once the floodgates were tampered with, they'd be uncontrollable. What? Him cry? He had
never
cried! He scrunched his eyes; choked out a cough; then grabbed at his face with both hands, his fingers holding hard, digging in as if it were impenitent plasticene. He forced himself to think, to identify the culprit. Aha! So that is you! Despair! What new meaning is brought to the word! Prior peripheral contact had not prepared him for the feelings hammering at his psychic vitals. Who are you? Response: I am thine Oppressor! Call me Hopelessness! How nicely your harbor does receive me. I am flexible, accommodative, and imperishable, if you wish. Don't fight me, like with a woman; you cannot fall into my arms without also getting caught in my clutches. No! No! Don't think of getting out of bed! I need you to meet my sisters: Helplessness and Noselfworth! Now admit it! There's no way you can break the pattern, and it's out of your control, you stupid shit! You are doomed, so accept your half-death this morning! Yes! Yes! And which half would you like embalmed? What difference? None! I shall decapitate one, incapacitate the other. Not that you really have a choice, rendered, as you are--ineffectual: totally human. You realize, don't you? That was your primordial mistake; acknowledge that fact. You were quite secure, quite a productive automaton, inspired by the fuel of countless layers of lies, denials, rationalizations. All these merely evoked a plenipotentiary for antiexacerbatory evasive excuses for what you considered was society's behavior towards you, when, in reality, it was your own frangibility the courier hastened to conceal. But what matter that as long as you were able to function day by day by day by deadly day? incarcerated as you were in a miasmic bliss of constantly incrassating ignorance--of your own conjuring, mind you!--you were a living testimonial that even self-flattery can make one's own self of a fool useful. Who knows? In such contemptible and pitiable stupidity you might have ended your days. That is no longer to be. No more than you can draw the same breath of air twice. Now you can never draw a cool breath inflamed as you are with your night's autodecortication. A pretty darn good job, too, considering you did it with your eyes closed. Now what? Deal with that strange sensation. What is it like? Suspended animation. Worse. A soul desiccated in Hell, anabiosis. Floating inside a vacuum bulb. Instinct, self-preservation directs the search for a tether. In my flailing the delicate burn of a silk thread speedrunning between my fingers, and instantly I'm rappelling on this side of sanity; movement: antidote of depressions's ennui. Think! What has happened? All these years, the deep concern that I would die unfullfilled. It wasn't so bad this fear though I refused to face it. Then, after last night, sitting with a beautiful woman, there, just for me; gone, because of me never to return, all is hopeless. All through this night, I've tried to hide this fact by discovering other things wrong with myself. Before I knew it, my involuntary nervous system goes to pot. This brings on a delightful acute anxiety attack which says I've lost control of my life, also makes me become something special which makes me regain control followed by
repetition
general
. Yes! Round two, coming up. Anxiety upon anxiety. Woe is me! How? How? Woe is me, how? Distract yourself! Set yourself free! Force yourself to part the path! Okay, I can do that! I can do that! No matter how much I may enjoy this misery, I can shake it free. Okay. First, tell me! Tell me, will I ever see Mary Dolorosso again? Don't you understand, you worthless piece of dusty shit, you will die without ever having sniffed the very essence of life? Here we go again! Emerging from the fuscous muddlement was one startling clear fact: Mary Dolorosso had opened a door of his life that would never be closed again, and, thus, the person he knew as Sam Scopia was instantly and markedly changed.

Exploding in a rage, he tore the covers from the bed, lashing them across the room high to the furthermost wall as he forced himself to stand on the freezing floor, his genitals drawing in, small, tight, hard to the now roughskinned sack. Packed to his teeth, his throat filled with the attritus of fear: ash, dry as death.

Downcurtain.

Next scene.

As a sooty smoke drifted away from before his eyes, Sam could only sense that a scurfy mud was slipping from over his brain, not realizing it was the scoriaceous product of his heart's pilgrimage through the volcano of his soul. Only now was the night's blackness releasing him, and it came a blink at a time until the pain of the light in the shop made him snap his head about to clear his sight. There was a gap in sequential memory. He fought to erase the amnesia, to no avail. He was in the shop, leaning hard against the worktable, wearing hat and jacket, realizing by the time that he had lost two hours of his life. He had no idea of how he got there; by feeling his face that he had not shaved; but nothing would tell him if he had breakfast, if he saw anyone, what he did. So? What does it matter? Who cares? His hands hung heavily in his jacket pockets, just as he felt his cheeks sag weightily. It mattered not, not a whit, what he'd been up to. Without moving his head, his eyes now searched the room, not for anything in particular, just to see what he saw. What came through his eyes had never penetrated before--the shop, not the shop in which he worked; the shop in which he grew old. Like a mouse emptying a sackful of rice by snacking it away grain by grain, the full sack is soon known only to be a collapsed, empty bag on the floor. Wasn't it always so? Would one could order another full sack of life. The change had come so insidiously, painstakingly slowly it was never noticed. So was it with the moments of his life right to his very second. So complete was Rose's affect on him, Sam rejected himself totally as a person. He wasn't selective in choosing the one aspect that made her not want to see him again--the fact was the corruption of his ego by his younger self wouldn't allow him to accept even that part of the truth happened to be that she was fearful of her father and their family's feud. Not seeing that, he could see, however, that he was totally rotten, and suddenly, for the very first time, time had a new meaning. Heretofore, he'd have a healthy respect for time...if he wasn't such a shit. Then, his eyes caught the tack hammer, the curved needle, the tack puller, the stapler, the scissor, the dikes. Tools, his tools. The sight of them made him shiver. Not the shiver from a chill, the kind that would make him feel tight all over, then cause his body to shake. It was a quiet shiver, one born of nervousness, anxiety. Fear. Enervating. Deadening. Time passed unnoticed, but yoked to it the fatigue that made Sam unable to sustain the spasticity either in mind or body, which made room for sadness to envelope him. He saw the tools for exactly what they were, what they had been. He forced himself to pick up the hammer, then, with revulsion, drop it. He nodded his head slowly. He had come to understand one more thing about himself, about this life. The spiritual, natural, instinctual forces generated in his gonads went into his guts then detoured to come out his hands instead of an erect penis brought to orgasm into a helpmate's receptacle. The lust to endure was put into his tools. Each one of them came into his hand with the sensual slickness of a dribbling, springtide, embrocated vagina. Each one of them replaced his penis. Each one of them demanded satisfaction. If there was no woman by which he could walk, or hold hands, or embrace, or kiss, or fuck; then, he could drive a tack head home, hard and deep; he could run a needle in and out fast, pricking heatedly; or he could strip a chair bare, see its hidden mysteries and incarcerate therein a few wishes of his own. Be that such as it was. It was now. Now meant gone. All gone. Everything was all gone. Time had been played--unforgiving, irretrievable time. Lost. Lost. Lost! What a pity. He could not undo what he had done to himself. Sam had thrust upon Sam, so very long ago it seems, choices made in a pique; made to spite, made to gain revenge, made to induce misery. But, he knew now, "society"--whoever that was--wasn't listening. Society was indifferent. Society couldn't give a fuck about Sam Scopia. That didn't make him unique, however. What did make him somewhat rare, though, was that in the face of life's cruelty, life's indifference, Sam Scopia had fallen victim to one of life's more egregious incorrigibility's: self-betrayal.