Prayers for the Living

by Alan Cheuse

  All right, so I’ll call him. But I’m warning you.

  Me, you’re warning? You never warned me before. So go ’head.

  So here goes.

  And he opens his mouth to speak, and the bird lets out a cry as terrifying as any I’ve ever heard, a voice of caves and murder and turds and tar, bones melted by radiation, wild and monstrous, devouring mutant cells, a people turned against their god, a god turned against a people.

  This is how you call him, Jacob? My own body trembles yet with the noise of it.

  Look, he heard me, Jacob says, and we notice that even as Manny stands poised, a man frozen for an instant, time-bound but timeless—and in that instant all his life passes before my eyes, baby, boy, student, father, pride-bound man with shock-white hair and white shirt, the trousers dark, dark—he opens his own mouth and moves his lips and through the as-yet-tranquil glass we see the words appear.

  Pa-pa?

  And I say to Jacob, or to the bird, whatever, I say, tell him I’m here, too, that I’m with you, he didn’t call me this morning, he said good-bye this morning but he didn’t call when he got to the office. Tell him.

  And the bird gives another of those fear-making shrieks, and I am sorry that I have asked, my skin is crawling, and even the old dried-up parts of me inside they suddenly twitch and shrivel, and my fists are balled up into tinier fists, and those fists into even smaller balls of flesh.

  Ma-ma, too?

  We can read his lips.

  Yes, Mama, too, I shout at him soundlessly. Both of us.

  I’m coming, he makes with his lips.

  And around and down he swings the satchel and makes a large bulge, then a crack, in the glass.

  OOOsssh!

  At this height the wind even on this seemingly calm morning comes whistling in around him, a stream of air he wades into deeper as he raises the satchel and makes another mighty smack. My Manny, my woodsman! Up and whack! once more, and the window gives outward, no star-shaped pattern now, because that design was another kind of accident, and it could have been a cross as well as a star or a half-moon, crescent and star, or in another life and time the anaconda and the star of David, or who knows but in some other world where birds are kings and gods are human beings, or so they imagine, where a feather and wing might be a sign of prayer, of devotion, or in the comical chance of a universe some crazy person could make up, in the book of a writer in Alaska or someone sitting in a madhouse rest home hospital dayroom, the sun streaming in like wine, and the wind a crescent-shaped fruit wearing an officer’s cap, or in the daydream of a lover just returned from a run, a man with a broad young face beneath an ancient’s shock of colorless hair, an emblem of someone no more than what he was, like the rest of us, lucky and an error, flesh and bones and mostly chance, the regard for a survivor, and now gone up or about to disappear like wind, smoke, water.

  He was himself and all these things, or could have been or should have been, and all the while he was my Manny, I gave him birth but never knew him, and who can know except but we make up the motives and they are like feathers in the wind, twigs on a stream near the park near our house, this way that, falling leaves making erratic descent in an autumn thunderstorm—only the fanatic makes a pattern he believes in, and the mother is a fanatic of a kind we never see, except thank God, or bird, not like the killers in Europe, those who gave you your numbers, they were like lovers and mothers to a dream of murder, nursing it at all cost, or the dancers in the saffron robes where for a while you, my Sadie, made your life, you, thin, hair shorn, incense in your nose, bells on your toes.

  Oh, to be a fanatic, oh to give yourself over to the force of another, to a pattern made by another! And that way to know what you mean!

  Is this what he’s thinking now as he stands with the wind on his face, the fear flowing out of him like blood from the wounds on his face and neck from the flash and splinter of the glass he’s smashed? He could be thinking, I have made my own way, skimming, skipping through traditions and professions and families and lovers like a stone spit out of a hard man’s swift-wristed fist, a stone he’s spun upon the flashing, dancing waters. He could be thinking, there is still room behind me—even as he hears the sound of the watchman approaching, because the breaking window has set off a fire alarm, a small blinking red light on a board many floors below, and he knows this—then changing again, thinking, I do not have much more time or any room at all, and I can’t go back, make it up, go before a judge, seek a daughter, find shelter elsewhere, live my life, but there is this wind, and he cannot think anymore, all his life it has been go forward, go forward, a disease of motion, this is America, onward, upward, and he stares into the wind and into the light from the rising blood-gut ball of the new morning sun. So.

  His white hair streaming, his white shirt streaked with his own blood, he lets the satchel fall to the glass-littered carpet and steps forward one foot more and turning sideways inserts himself like a letter to his father into the jagged-edged opening.

  Pushes against the wind, and looks up as he does so, searching for one split second the sky for the bird of passage.

  And he pushes once more against the wind, this time as though he wants to climb back up into me . . . his mother.

  Prayer for the Living

  ALL THESE YEARS A MILLION TIMES I MUST HAVE HEARD the words. But a woman doesn’t say. I run my fingers around the jagged outline of this shattered star. On my lips, water. Ashes on my tongue. In my nostrils flecks of incense. In my ears, the tinkling of bells, the rustling of cloth. Could it be saffron? I see nothing dark or light so cannot say. What, anyway, is the feeling of saffron? Old woman, blind, sick with a swollen heart, bowels now clogged with growths like tubers of a tree, old woman shaking off a dream lying in bed in the green west hills of Jersey, in America, Western Hemisphere—so she doesn’t know these things? so she hasn’t been alive, a student of life for what feels like a million years?—on the planet Earth. She moves her lips in prayer, though a woman mustn’t say it, and no one may be listening, a prayer for him, for me, for them, for you, for all of us poor creatures bound by stupid gravity to the mercies of a traveling sun.