“I still have so much anger in my heart,” Geno said. “I think given the chance, I’d shoot Anthony Fox in the head and enjoy it.”
“You lived through your own Auschwitz,” Micah said. “Revenge is a luxury you can leave behind, habibi. Don’t lose your humanity. You’re too fine a boy to waste time getting it back.”
The tears dripped out of his Geno’s eyes and nose. Micah reached and brushed them away.
Geno closed his eyes at the human touch.
A survivor’s touch.
A father’s touch.
“You’re too fine a boy,” Micah said, followed by a long flow of Ladino. Geno couldn’t understand all the words, but the tone around the endearments was clear.
Poor boy. You poor sweet boy.
My poor darling, precious boy.
You are strong and kind and humane and you are the only one around here with a lick of…
Realizing common sense and humanity were the same thing, Geno tipped over and fell into Micah’s chest, burying his face in flour and muscle. He didn’t weep. He just went home.
Micah rocked him, a hand stroking Geno’s head. Inked numbers in his dusty skin. Strong arms and a stronger heart.
“Hijo querido,” he said. “You and I know what it’s really about.”
EP’s spring exhibition was set for the end of June. Residents could show independent projects, or, for those who needed structure, work within a concept set by the staff.
Aedith came up with an idea using masks, calling it Outside/Inside/Hidden. She brought in a tall stack of blank, white masks, explaining it was the way they were stacked on the art store shelves that inspired her.
“The way one fits snug on top of the other,” she said, demonstrating with two of them. “We don’t just wear one mask, we wear many. First the mask we show to the outside world and under it, the mask we put over our feelings. Under that…” She lifted up the second mask, revealing the empty table. “What’s under there? What’s the thing we keep under layers of masks?”
Outside/Inside/Hidden would be a hands-on exhibit, meant to be touched and handled by viewers.
“Everyone get the metaphor?” Corley said, pointing around the table. “We’re allowing this to be touched.”
“I don’t know, I can’t quite grasp the concept,” Juan said. “Can someone hit me over the head with it?”
The art room downshifted into the quiet energy of creative production. Geno painted his Outside mask a metallic black. Sections of jaw and cheek and brow precisely outlined in gold with a single-hair brush. He glued tiny nuts, bolts and washers along the contours of the face, then went over the whole thing with clear varnish. The end result was Mos in armor, a steam punk machine man.
The Inside mask Geno left virgin white, pristine and unadorned. Tears gathered in a silvery border beneath the eye holes. But instead of falling as droplets, they fell as tiny handcuffs. Then Geno dipped a brush in red paint and bounced it on his wrist, splattering the mask with blood.
“Whoa,” Corley said, leaning to look. “That’s…”
“Does it need something else?”
“No. Don’t touch it, don’t mess with it. Leave it like that.”
Geno came up blank for the Hidden motif. He couldn’t think of anything, until one day when The Thing stopped by. Geno was sitting in a creative sulk, cutting one of the plain masks into thin strips and watching them collect in a pile on the table top. He stopped. Slowly reached and hollowed out the center of the pile, pushing the plastic into a nest. He blinked a few times, then jumped up from the table.
“Don’t touch that,” he said to no one and everyone. “Nobody touch that. Be right back.”
He ran across the lobby and barreled downstairs to the kitchen.
“I need an egg,” he said to Stav. “Can I have an egg?”
“Sure,” she said. “Scrambled?”
“No, no, I mean the shell. I just need the shells.”
With her spatula she pointed to the metal basin holding a morning’s worth of eggshells. Geno picked out two halves, rinsed out the goo and took them back upstairs. He trawled through the shelves and drawers of art supplies and found some yellow feathers.
He carefully glued the plastic nest together and arranged the shells in the hollow, adding a few snippets of yellow feathers. Then he backed away and took it in.
The broken, robbed egg in the henhouse looked exactly the way he envisioned.
But it was so sad.
For the first time, Geno wasn’t sure he wanted this to be his hidden truth.
“It’s fantastic,” Stef said, coming to look.
“It’s not done,” Geno said. “Something’s missing.”
It took a few days and a morning of watching Max bury things in the sand table and dig them up again. Once more, Geno jumped up, heading to his room this time. He searched in a drawer for a box kept tightly closed and hidden away. Inside were pieces of cobalt blue sea glass he and Carlito picked up on the beach, the first summer after Analisa died. Little treasures scattered in the waves and sand for her two chicks to find.
Hey boys. It’s me.
Geno pushed the smooth, frosted fragments around on the desk. He found two that were roughly teardrop shaped. Put together, they made a heart, which he carefully glued on the edge of one eggshell, as if it were spilling out.
“Wow,” Stef said, arms crossed and chin nodding. “It’s like I told you. They—”
“Didn’t get the best of me,” Geno finished.
The ups and downs of recovery could kill a guy. One day you were two floors shy of the top of the world, gazing at your strong, blue heart, thinking everything was going to be all right. You had a nice Italian dinner with Vern, listened to some great stories about Nathan in his youth, laughing hard through the bittersweet memories. You told Vern, finally, what his unflagging support meant to you, how you couldn’t thank him enough. You got some solid, well-deserved sleep.
The next day, for no damn reason, you felt like garbage.
“No damn reason,” Stef said. “You’re sure about that?”
Geno’s head bobbled back around on his shoulders before he flopped over his crossed arms on the table. “Not to state the obvious but I miss my family.”
“Dude, just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s invalid. You’re entitled to feel sad about a crushing loss. Sad barely begins to describe it.”
“It’s so fucking hard,” Geno said. “And I don’t mean hard like difficult. When my mom died, it’s like all the softness went out of my life. Everything was either sharp or flat. It hurt like being cut with a razor and I had nothing soft to lean on or hide behind. My dad was there. He tried. But he broke. Something in him just unwound and hung loose.”
“And your brother drifted from you as well,” Stef said.
“The more I think about it, the more it seems like I’ve been lonely for a really long time. And when I look down the road toward the rest of my life, I don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s not fucking fair. I’ll never be able… I’ll never be in love.”
“What makes you say that?”
Geno spread his hands. It was too obvious for words.
“You’ll never be in love because you were raped?”
“It changes everything.”
“So you’re saying it changed one of two things specific to love. It either made you inherently unlovable, or it altered your willingness to love others. Which is it?”
Geno didn’t answer.
“It wasn’t a trick question,” Stef said. “The answer is the truth in your gut. Are you unlovable because you were raped, or are you intensely cautious because you were raped?”
“Cautious.”
Stef nodded. “Trust is going to be a thing with you.”
“An issue.”
“Bluntly, yeah.
If we want to mindfully turn ‘issue’ inside-out, we could call it a cause. Or a value.”
“I’m just…really scared,” Geno said.
“Brother, if you weren’t scared, I’d be concerned something was wrong. Tell me what scares you.”
“Everything.”
“Now that’s being lazy,” Stef said. “Try to name things. One thing. Pin it down.”
“I’m scared I’ll constantly be on my guard. Constantly fearful of being…”
“Being what?”
“Betrayed.”
Stef circled his hand in the air, asking for more.
“Screwed over,” Geno said. “Railroaded. Taken advantage of. Raped. Emotionally raped.”
“Someone hurting you without your consent.”
“I guess.”
“That’s going to happen.”
Geno’s eyebrows pulled down.
“I make the confident prediction,” Stef said. “Backed by all the money in my wallet, someday, someone you care for is going to hurt you. You’ll like a girl and she won’t like you back. Or she will for a little while, then dump you. Maybe after she sleeps with your best friend. I can’t predict the details but I’m telling you, someone you love will let you down. Disappoint you. Maybe even break your heart. It’ll happen. But then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Play out the scenario. Hypothetically. You give some girl your heart and soul, your pain and secrets, and she shits on you. Then what?”
“I…”
“Worst thing that could happen?”
“I hurt.”
“Is that the worst?”
“Yes. It is.” It sounded lame but it was Geno’s story and he was sticking to it.
“So then what do you do?”
“I don’t know,” Geno said, feeling like he was engaged in swordplay with a plastic knife.
“What did you do before you were raped? When you were hurting? Don’t think too much. Say the honest, gut answer.”
Geno shook his head. “I don’t know, I’d talk to someone? Carlito. Or Chris. My mom or dad.”
“So circle back. Now what’s the worst that could happen to you?”
“I hurt and I have no one to talk to.”
“Which is worse than just hurting?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you push that a little?”
“What do you mean?”
“Equate hurting and having no one to something else that happened to you.”
Geno swallowed hard. “It would be like being in Anthony’s basement again.”
Stef nodded.
“Helpless,” Geno said. “And scared.”
“That’s right.”
“Nobody coming.”
“Nobody to rescue you.”
“Yeah.”
Stef let a few beats pass. “I don’t know if this is answerable,” he said. “But I’ll ask. At any time during your ordeal, did you feel you were unworthy of rescue?”
“No,” Geno said. Fast. It was out his mouth before his brain could mull it over.
“Never?”
“Not once.”
“And now? Are you still worthy of rescue?”
“Yeah. But I don’t have anyone.”
“Which means?”
“I don’t know. What? Stop asking me shit.” Geno laughed, but with a shrill edge.
“It means you have to find your people. Hear me out a sec. I’m not saying losing your family is something you bravely and blithely move on from. It’s not something you get over. What happened to you is horrible. Is, not was. This is still happening. It’s unfair. It’s inhumane. It’s a tragedy. It hurts and it changed you. But it doesn’t mean you are doomed to walk this earth alone. Or that you deserve to walk the earth alone. It sucks you have to build a new tribe. But it isn’t impossible.”
Geno stared into the distance. “I hate that I have to.”
“Can you hate it and do it anyway?”
The question brought back days with Wayne. Learning to pull an attack close, shrimp out and run like hell. Heart behind your teeth but you did it anyway.
“Yeah,” Geno said. “I think I can.”
Jav sat at his reserved booth at the Bake & Bagel, reading Neil Gaiman over his lunch. Geno came out from the back room and around the counter, his clothes and apron dusty with flour. He carried his own sandwich and a bottle of ice tea. “¿Puedo sentarme?”
“For a small fee,” Jav said, then gestured to the bench across.
“So,” Geno said. “Remember when I found your notebook and instead of returning it right away, I read it like a dick?”
“No, I don’t recall that at all,” Jav said. He picked up the napkin dispenser and pretended to throw it at Geno’s head. “Dick.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
Jav shrugged. “It’s weird in there.”
“You wrote about me.”
“Yeah, I wondered if you saw that. I hope you didn’t think I was making fun of you. I have a funny way of looking at the world. I see names or situations and my weird head starts telling a story. That’s all.”
“I get it,” Geno said. “I thought it was cool, actually.”
“Yeah?”
A bit of quiet passed while Geno ate. “Random question for your weird head,” he said. “Do you believe in an afterlife?”
“Kind of,” Jav said slowly. “I envision it as the ultimate cocktail party where you get to talk to everyone you ever wanted and get all the answers to your questions.”
“Like who killed JFK?”
“Did Atlantis exist? What were they pyramids really for? Area Fifty-One in Roswell, what was that all about?”
“I think after Q and A, you get to have a beer with your seventy-seventh great-grandfather.”
Jav pointed at him. “See now that would be cool. Learning the history of your name. Imagine if you were led into a presentation room with this gigantic family tree.”
“A guided tour of your genealogy.”
“The ultimate documentary. Narrated by David Attenborough.”
Geno crumpled up his napkin and dropped it on the empty plate. “Do you think everyone’s happy there?”
“In heaven?” Jav wrinkled his brow over the question. “Huh. Happy? I don’t know.”
“I sometimes have a problem with that aspect of it. The way people say, ‘He’s at peace now’ or, ‘She’s in a better place.’ Pissed me off at my mother’s funeral. Maybe it was a better place but who were they to say she was peaceful there?”
“So you’re thinking maybe there’s no physical suffering, but the departed feel sadness or regret on the other side.”
“I guess I’m wondering, do they miss us?”
With his finger, Jav made patterns in some spilled sugar on the table top. “I was talking about my cousin with Stef once and he said, ‘He must miss you like crazy.’ I believed it. I mean I could believe it. I could believe heaven or whatever was a place where sadness still existed.”
“See, I think about my mother,” Geno said. “Watching from the other side while I was getting raped. I have this vision of her beating on the wall. The barrier. Whatever separates this life and the afterlife. Bashing her fists against it and screaming to get through.”
Jav felt his eyes widen and his finger stopped moving. “Jesus.”
“I can’t accept she would be on the other side, floating in her state of eternal grace, just watching. She had to have been tearing the place apart. It’s what mothers do.”
Stunned, Jav rubbed his fingertips together, watching the sugar crystals fall like snow. “I was skiing once,” he said. “On line for the lift and up ahead was a mother and little boy, maybe six or seven. And he miscalculated getting on the chair and slid off before the bar was down.
Just a few feet, he wasn’t hurt. But then the mother jumped off too.”
“Yikes.”
“The attendant shut down the line, got them back on their feet. Everyone was fine, they were off on the next chair. The attendant looked at me, shaking his head and he said, ‘The mothers always jump.’”
Geno laughed, nodding.
“He was like, ‘I’ve never seen one hesitate. No thought, they just go. The dads continue ahead and call back, I’ll meet you up there. The mothers jump.’”
“It’s what they do,” Geno said.
“Then I’d have to agree with you,” Jav said. “She must’ve been out of her mind. Whatever the afterlife is, she must’ve been tearing up the place.”
Geno chewed on his bottom lip as he drew a deep breath in and out. “Weird, because as much as I hate envisioning her like that, I need it. I need her to have been that way.”
Jav crossed his arms as the idea grew larger and more intense. “Wow, that’s a powerful fucking image, man. A mother on the other side, whaling on the boundary and can’t get to her children.”
“Since I’m sharing everything in my weird head, I’ll give you another image.”
“Trust me, dude,” Jav said, smiling. “I live in my weird head.”
“When my dad died, he flatlined on the operating table. Doctors told me they were able to bring him back, but only for a minute before he flatlined again. And I wonder what happened in that minute. Did he have the classic out-of-body experience and drift toward the light? You hear stories about it and people say they almost get to the other side when they hear voices telling them it’s not time yet. ‘Go back. Go back. It’s not your time.’ I wonder when my Dad’s heart stopped the first time, if someone told him to go back. He came back, but then…”
Jav hardly dared breathe. “Go on.”
“I think my mother called to him. Like she needed him with her. She couldn’t be on the other side alone. She was losing her mind, she wanted him to come to her. I think it must’ve been the longest minute of my father’s life.”
“His second life.”
A Charm of Finches Page 49
