Morpheus

by Charnofsky, Stan;

  Across the room, by the tall bookshelves, I spied Jeri, reaching up as high as she could for a title near the top. She was on her toes and I was aware of the muscles in her legs, the perfect symmetry, the womanish maturity. Oddly, seeing her that way, in a prepossessing posture, unposed, so grandly authentic, for the first time ever I felt a stirring and powerful sexual urge.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Seven years have wandered by, some chaotic, others tranquil, a couple stunning in their allure, since that party at my dad’s and Lee’s home.

  The absence of Abby—hey, that’s alliterative, absence of Abby—that evening provided the impetus for me to look outward at diverse possibilities. For example, I first saw my stepsister, Jeri, in an erotic way; five or so years younger than I, she appeared to me, nonetheless, a flesh-and-blood, sensual person.

  I was fully absorbed in Abby, so my realization was nothing more than that: huh, imagine, little Jeri, a fascinating young woman! But I put her off the main track, on a sidecar, and forgot about her, except as a family companion.

  My priority at that time was to help Abby face her demons, possibly confront indigent Alejandro in the flesh, rout old contaminations, and handle her present issues with less emotion and more logic.

  When I finally decided to set a date, I approached her tentatively, with great care.

  We had gone to a movie—Schindler’s List—and were in my car, heading toward her apartment. I said, “Sweetie, do you think you’re ready for that little face-off with your cousin?” I’m not sure she liked when I called her “sweetie” because she saw herself as anything but sweet.

  She looked up sharply, and said, “Your insistence on fixing me is a paradox. I see you equally troubled, and you have no answers for yourself, so why do you keep trying to mend my broken places?”

  As writers, we were often on the same page, and I recognized her reference to Hemingway noting that people had to become “strong at the broken places.”

  “That’s the irony of it all,” I said. “We can see others’ weaknesses but not our own. Maybe I’ll help you get clear, and then you can help me dig into my secret world of pain. I have no illusions that I’m healthy. My visits to my shrink confirm that.”

  When she got contentious, Abby’s face tended to blotch pink, color rose from her neck and made her appear primed for combat. With me, over time, she had muted some of her rage, but I was under no illusion that it was dismissed; under the surface was that awful, unsettled wrath from the trespasses she had endured.

  “I told you I’d do it, but I’m not happy about it. I expect nothing. My fool cousin has an anemic ability to process facts. As to whether I can help you? I doubt it. Not much proof that someone else can illuminate a person’s internal mysteries. You can’t solve mine, I can’t solve yours.”

  “I agree, but I do think going to my therapist has helped me to search for clues. She throws out bait and I have to fish. It’s true she can’t do it for me, but she helps me focus my exploring.”

  The red hue on her skin was beginning to settle, her discomfort lowering. As for me, I was aware that all during our brief conversation my breathing was shallow and my molars were working away on my tongue.

  Funny how, when trying to do several things at once, the unconscious part of the brain kicks in; surely I couldn’t think about my responses to Abby, my driving, and my compulsions all at the same time. The mouth habit, I knew, was a well-established addiction, and since I had been driving for several years, that too was habitual, without conscious thought. My total aware brain was working hard on our conversation. In an odd way, I felt satisfied that I had broached the subject with appropriate caution, and was not totally repulsed. I smiled inwardly. Help her then help me.

  So, she agreed. The time was ripe. I had to set up some sort of rendezvous situation. It was a complex task.

  I watched Alejandro for two mornings before deciding on a plan. He did the same thing at about the same time each day: exited the old hotel, turned up Weyburn, plodded along for a block or so, and awaited the arrival of office workers so he could approach them for alms.

  Abby said yes when I told her I was working on an exact time and place. She would meet me at nine on a Friday morning. It would be my task to collect Alejandro and convince him to join me; that would involve a creative motive, one that would pay off for him.

  What could that be: money, a guarantee of food, an addiction of his own to spirits? I had a couple of days to decide, so on Thursday morning I observed him more intensely in his daily routine. It paid off.

  When he had garnered a fistful of coins or bills, a paltry sum, for sure, but enough for what turned out to be his purpose, he shuffled over to Westwood Boulevard, plodded along for half a block, and entered an out-of-place lounge—out of place for that part of town––seedy from the outside, neon lights in the windows broadcasting, in yellow and red, a variety of domestic and imported beers.

  When Alejandro had gone in, I gave it three minutes and followed his lead. There was a grimy linoleum floor, which showed a scant reflection off its partly polished surface, of a yellow light from another advertisement, this one for Jack Daniels. He was at a curved bar, dark in color, smooth and rounded at two ends; the place was empty except for him and one other patron at a table, eating what looked like a platter of eggs and bacon. It turned out he was the owner, consuming his breakfast, while a young man, barely of legal age, stood behind the bar, leaning on an elbow, gabbing away with my quarry.

  I couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if the young man was doing most of the talking, grinning, poking Alejandro on the shoulder every so often. On his part, the indigent cousin seemed to be absorbed with his frothy mug, and, as I watched, pointed for a refill, which the bartender accommodated.

  Four mugs in all, he consumed, for a moment seemed to be cleaning his fingernails with a small pen-knife, then appeared to grow drowsy and lowered his head on his arms. The owner stood and gestured to his employee, saying rather stridently: “Hey, Gabby, he can doze for five minutes, then out he goes,” his tone as much for me, a respectable patron, as it was for his worker.

  I watched with interest. It was clearly a repeated event, a morning ritual the lounge engaged in with its five dollar morning customer.

  I waited, seated at the far end of the bar, myself nursing a ginger ale. After close to five minutes, the bartender tugged at Alejandro’s moth-eaten outer sweater and announced: “Time to go, old buddy. Home-time. Walk your way back. No more booze for you. Sayonara.” He looked over at me and said, “He ain’t all there. Not mean or anything. Just absent.”

  I shook my head, plunked down a couple of bucks, and rose from my stool. Alejandro was on his feet, slowly making his way out of the dark cavern of comfort, a look on his face of misery, of abject resignation. I held the door for him, which he did not acknowledge, and, when we stepped out into the morning light, I squinting, he blinking erratically, I turned and gripped his sleeve, saying, “Here’s a dollar. Buy a couple of apples.” I looked into his watery eyes for the first time, the brows above bushy and wild, saw emptiness, not a trace of intelligence, and it stunned me. “Tell you what,” I said, determined to follow through with my plan, “I’ll meet you here tomorrow morning, same time, and I’ll buy you a beer. How’s that?”

  He stared at me, blank as a blackboard just erased. Something clicked because, though his lips sagged apart like someone asleep, his head moved up and down, and he whispered, “Tomorrow, same time.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And I’ll buy you a beer. Can you remember?”

  “I got it,” he murmured, and crinkled up his nose, turning his eyes into narrow slits. “Same time, and you’ll buy me a beer.”

  I didn’t know what to say to Abby. This shell of a man was not likely to own up to any early-life transgressions, let alone remember any. It wasn’t clear to me that he would know what we were talking about. Still, I wanted to give it a try—for Abby’s sake. I’d heard it said that even if an assailant does no
t respond to a confrontation, the discharge from the victim is bound to provide healing and, maybe, I hoped, a sense of closure.

  Without telling her any details, I informed Abby that I would pick her up at eight fifteen, and we would drive into Westwood. I prompted her not to expect too much, but be ready for whatever she found. The mystery bothered her, but I could also tell she was ready to take on this dodgy installment of her life’s narrative, and would face it, whatever the risk.

  It was a cerulean morning, the kind that smiles at Angelenos when a breeze is hefty enough to cleanse the air of pollutants.

  In my car Abby began to speak rapidly of a book she had just finished, Rabbit Run, by Updike, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his Rabbit series of novels. It seemed to me like a masking tactic, the focus on her upcoming task too glaring—like looking directly at the sun—for her to tolerate.

  “I’ve never read a sexual encounter scene that was so detailed, yet without a glimmer of eroticism, without any attraction in it for the man or the woman. A grungy apartment, unappealing people, sex as a metaphor for escape from life’s sordid antics. How could sex be so misshapen, yet described so meticulously? Amazing writer, but what a morbid scene!” She rattled this opinion off in a matter of seconds, leaving me appreciative of her insight and aware of her veiled motive.

  There was traffic, vehicular and pedestrian, as the labor force headed to offices and businesses. After finding parking, I stalled a bit to be sure Alejandro would have arrived, since I didn’t want to beat him there.

  We entered the dimly lit pub, took a moment to adjust our eyes—the same cruddy linoleum with the yellow glare ran the length of the room, the owner was working on pancakes at a brown, worn table, the same young bartender leaned against a cupboard, above which stemmed glasses were hanging in slots—and, sure enough, there at the opposite end of the semicircular bar, nursing a foamy mug of beer, was Cousin Alejandro.

  He looked up slowly, as if his eyes and head were in a bridle, holding them back from any sudden shift of position. Ignoring my companion, he frowned, raised his arm, and said, “Hey, you there. I remember.” He turned to the bartender and said, “That gringo, he promised. So hit me again. He pays.”

  The boy looked at me, and I nodded. The mug was filled with tap beer, the spigot directly under a scrolled, red Millers sign.

  I was acutely aware of the smell of alcohol, perhaps from Alejandro’s mug, but likely also from dozens of spills on the counter, linoleum, and strip carpets beneath the tables, in the shadows, never fully scrubbed out.

  I felt Abby next to me tense, frozen actually, staring at the sullied visage of a person she knew as her long-hated attacker. Her elbow touched my side and I took hold and held it firmly. “It’ll be okay,” I whispered. “He is both pathetic and fragile.”

  Abby in tow, I moved slowly toward Alejandro, her reluctance palpable in the heavy pull required to tug her along. We approached her cousin’s perch, while across the smooth, coffee-colored countertop from Abby leaned the boy bartender. I sat next to Alejandro, with Abby on my other side, but not before she dug her nails into my left hand so hard, little dimples appeared, certain, I expected, to leave bruise marks.

  For an instant I got out of myself and imagined the terror Abby must have been experiencing, her mind surely reconstructing snatches of ugly memory, the way movies show flashbacks in a troubled character’s brain.

  I wouldn’t have put it past her to have brought along a weapon, like a knife or scissors, concealed under her jacket, ready at a moment of frustration, to plunge into this thug of a cousin’s black heart.

  On his part, Alejandro showed no recognition of my companion, no acknowledgement, in fact, of her presence next to me. He seemed to be swimming in his own private nightmare, the life he had fallen into, his habitual morning ritual, altered that day only by my unusual offer and my presence beside him.

  In that moment, I wasn’t sure of a way to proceed; it was like starting a war without a clear view of how to win the peace. To help Abby, there had to be a realistic encounter, a way for the cousins to confront, with her planting on him the years of bitterness, the buried insult exposed, finally and vividly, to the healing light of contrition. But I was hard-pressed to grasp the benefit for him, even though it seemed logical that he too had carried with him, over time, the burdens of his sordid actions. What I did not know was how much, if any, of the imminent confrontation he was capable of absorbing.

  A sudden regret passed through me, that I had arranged this little tableau in such a dismal setting, the pub an unappetizing atmosphere for any sort of intense dialogue. That thought soared as I caught the flicker of the window neon lights reflecting off Abby’s face.

  As was my style, I took a deep breath and plunged in.

  “I know your name. It’s Alejandro. I know your family.”

  Slowly, his grizzled head turned. I saw foam on his upper lip. I saw eyes of desperation, black as the countertop on which his elbows rested. He tried to smile and it came out as a sneer, askew, out of kilter. When he spoke, it was as if from another dimension, eerie, unreal.

  “You know my family. Well, I don’t know my family, so forget it.”

  “I brought one of your family with me.”

  He did not respond—almost as if he did not, could not, hear such a thing. I leaned over and touched him on his sweatered arm. He recoiled, but stayed seated, a tangible fear seeming to consume his stolid frame.

  “She wants to talk to you.”

  Before Abby could react, before I could turn and encourage her, a sound deep in Alejandro’s throat, an undistinguishable animal sound as if from some curious primeval forest, began to swell in volume. I wheeled about to look at him and saw, to my amazement, tears smearing his ragged face.

  Abby peered around me and saw them as well. Another surprise, as from her throat came a rasping, snarl-like noise, followed by: “What are your tears for, dickhead? I’m the one who got screwed!”

  Alejandro began to sob, shoulders heaving, hands atremble, breath interrupted, shallow, a cavernous anguish stifling him.

  I looked at Abby; tears made her face shimmer in the garish light: the two antagonists of long ago weeping like infants, the electricity between them palpable as I bent back to allow for each a clear view of the other.

  There were no words for a full minute, as the two faced each other, unmasked derision from the one as she leaned aggressively toward her cousin, abject despair from the other as he gazed hopelessly at this insulting female. Finally, Alejandro whispered, in a grating, hollow voice, “I think I killed someone. I think I’m a murderer.”

  It took Abby half a second to explode back: “You may have, you dumb asshole, but with me you killed my heart, and let the rest of me live.”

  He turned his body, awkwardly, stiffly, as if he were arthritic, and peered at Abby out of pools of ebony pain. For a long moment he stared, and at last muttered, “Who are you?”

  She was so disrupted by his question she eased back, immobilized. Slowly, she shook her head and said, “Hell no. You can’t get away with that shit. No way out, dummy. You’re the sick dude who forced himself on his own little cousin, and I’m the cousin whose childhood you destroyed.”

  Alejandro’s head was agitating back and forth on his bulky neck, his nose-tic blatant, his look, by then, a portrait of confusion. “I … I don’t know you,” he whispered hoarsely. He struggled for an instant, and tried to lift himself off his stool. When he was standing, he added, “Got to go. Sleep time.” He headed toward the light, picking, it seemed to me, at his teeth with that same pen-knife I had seen once before.

  The bartender, awed by the entire exchange, said softly, “After his beers, he goes back to his pad for a nap.”

  I wasn’t sure what Abby would do—if she would view this action as an attempted escape, again, from responsibility—as Alejandro hobbled toward the entry, dragging his war-wounded leg along. She began to laugh, softly at first, then eerily, with a flavor of lunacy in it, a
kind of laugh I had never heard from her before.

  “Let him go,” she said with finality, and hollered at the disappearing man, “You are pathetic! You are a sick, worthless freak! You got what you deserved!”

  Not sure what my maneuvering had achieved, I had two thoughts as Alejandro exited from what now felt like a dark tavern of iniquity: no forgiveness evident in Abby’s manner, and what humungous dreams that poor bastard must have to live with!

  I am always cautious about cause and effect reasoning, but, after two days had passed, Abby reported to me that her dreams were strangely different: in one she had experienced for years, the terrible ghoul of an animal that would awaken her in fear, again and again, had turned into a raven, its feathers awry and ruffled, that cawed helplessly because it could no longer fly.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Would this event with Alejandro alter Abby’s obsession about wanting to skewer Kentucky Prism? I was eager to find out.

  Remarkable how she struggled with two such deranged adversaries in her life, two criminals, actually. The thought arose that some people give out a certain karma that attracts losers. I wondered, then, if I was one—of the latter, that is.

  In my car, after we left the pub, hardly two words were spoken. Abby seemed lost in her own wakeful, malignant dream world. When we reached her apartment, she turned to me and said bluntly, “Come on in.”