You’ll have your gauze and your ointment: “I’ll just have to do this again later.”
“I know.”
You wipe up the counter.
“It will stop, Erik, someday.”
“Before I die?”
“You’re bleeding for a reason.” You scrub your hands and take a long time cleaning my blood from your fingernail.
Faces
I SEE FACES ALL over the place. In dust on windowpanes, in carpets, plaster, and the branches of trees, in the folds of clothes thrown onto the back of a chair. A man’s death mask—open mouth, bullet hole in his forehead—shows up in the layers of a stone I keep in my pocket. I have a frowning man in a fingerprint.
Once I saw your face in my breath. It was a February night under a streetlight. I can’t count how many times since then I’ve looked for you in the mist.
I spent a lot of time this morning making faces in the bathroom mirror. I was supposed to be showering, but I’d just read about grimaciers in one of my father’s books. Grimaciers were French performers who put on performances of facial expressions in the eighteenth century. I stood in front of the mirror and twisted my face and closed one eye. I used my fingers to stretch my mouth and stick out my tongue, and I opened my eyes as wide as they could go. I pinched my eyes and pulled my hair. I pushed my nose flat, I plugged my nostrils, and I let my mouth do what it wanted. I did this so long I started turning into animals. The animals didn’t exist in real life. My skin turned colors. I got hairy, furry, and patterns came up. More than once, my teeth became fangs. A few times, I had a trunk and horns. My eyes turned colors, and I barked and laughed.
I’ll tell you what made me stop. I made a face that reminded me of my father, but my face was not really mine or his, and I thought, That’s what he looked like when he died, when the bumper of a car crushed his head. Purple and his eyes backward, showing white, and his tongue rolling three feet out of his mouth.
New Year
Keep up the Latin
Read the Four Gospels
Write, read, think
Row
Discover my purpose
I’m always resolved to find you. We won’t find each other until we find each other, but I keep an eye open. I search all the time.
Fantasy
THE BATHTUB FILLS UP, and you stand at the window. A snowstorm clobbers the world.
An icicle hangs from the roof. It’s thicker than your fist at the top and as long as your arm. The winter tooth scares you. If it broke off and struck a person, it would go through bone. You look from the point of the icicle to the ground twenty feet below. A person would have to be standing in the hedge for the icicle to hit. You test the water with your fingers and turn off the faucet. You settle up to your neck and watch the clouds pass.
In this bathroom, you hold the sponge to your nose and smell my mother’s brand of black soap, which was my father’s. How long can you think about a sponge? How many times can you squeeze a wet sponge and watch the spill wind around your wrist, forearm, elbow, and biceps?
Headache
THE PAIN IN MY head. The skinny knife, and the hammer and nails. The lights of an enormous city pressed into my left eye, and the green aurora borealis rolling past.
Pain has no language other than growls or grunts. A headache for four days.
Nature
ALL THE MIRACLES OF nature I miss. All the miracles I catch.
My mother cracked an egg this morning and cried out. The egg had the beginning of a chick in it.
An ancient fruit tree of some kind, an apple or cherry, grows in the park a little way from here. Every March, it blooms. Ten thousand pink and white flowers bloom and shake for a week. Then, all the flowers fall, and for a while the tree stands in its own memories. Last week, I went to look at the tree in bloom. I stood under it while the blossoms fell all around. I couldn’t begin to understand what held me in place, or if it would ever let me go. I know you’re like this tree. What will happen to me when I hear your voice?
Apartment
I’LL TELL YOU SOMETHING that’s true. When you come into this apartment, you can stand in any room, reach out your arm, and put your hand on a book or magazine. It might not always be in English. It might be in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Irish, Chinese, or Russian. We have something in Dutch and something in Albanian, and something in a language I can’t even guess at. Basque, maybe, or Elvish. This shouldn’t matter to me, or to anyone, since it’s still text. If I look close enough at the symbols, I can make out a story, a poem, or a true fact. Almost all the books are in English.
You’d be amazed. Right now, in a rack behind the bathroom door, there’s a book of political cartoons; a biblical concordance; the New Yorker Book of Dog Cartoons; Getting Even, by Woody Allen; and a book of math puzzles. There are stacks of books everywhere, and the shelves where books live are all bowed. They’ll collapse at some point.
Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble, 1899; Westcott, Cynthia, The Gardener’s Bug Book; Kurlansky, Mark, Cod; Voltaire, Candide; Williams, Margery, The Velveteen Rabbit; Neely, Henry M., A Primer for Star-Gazers; The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1; Phillips, Mark, and Jon Chappell, Guitar for Dummies, 2nd edition; White, Carolyn, A History of Irish Fairies; Goldman, William, The Princess Bride; Elder, George R., The Body: An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism, Volume 2; Dahl, Roald, James and the Giant Peach; Thomas, Dylan, Under Milk Wood, London, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1956; Joyce, James, Dubliners; Lagerkvist, Par, The Dwarf; Kawabata, Yasunari, The Master of Go; Shakespeare, The Sonnets; Wodehouse, P. G., Right Ho, Jeeves!; National Geographic World Atlas, 8th edition; 1000 Years of Irish Poetry; all of Agatha Christie, and an armful of Asimov.
This is how I’m growing up.
I know my mother never stopped buying books after my father died. It was his passion, I think, though my mother’s a reader, too. She told me he would come home with boxes of books from library sales or garage sales, and he would sit up until all hours, reading the books, picking at them. Most he would keep; some he would give away again. “Such a mess,” she said once. “But you ate them, too.”
I was born with a book in my hand, she said. The haiku of Basho.
Now I see her face,
the old woman abandoned,
the moon her only companion
Or:
In the moonlight a worm
silently
drills through a chestnut
I see the silent worm. It’s like the wiggly, slippery thought that keeps me awake, right? I want to sleep but I can’t. Worm. Worm.
And who is that old woman? She’s a real woman, but she’s also the old woman inside me who will be left by everyone. Why won’t she die? Tick, tick, tick, tick. She’s a watch that won’t stop ticking, and she has to go on when all the other watches have died.
Purpose
THE REASON I’M ALIVE at all. How am I supposed to know? Only God knows. Maybe you know.
Maybe I’m meant to build bridges, cut tumors out of the brains of children, or find stars in the folds of space. I sometimes wonder if I’ll die a hero, protecting the world or just one person from death, from fire or murder. Why else do I bleed if not for something big and rare? I look deeper, get quieter, trying to find what makes me want to live.
Confessions
THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS and the Seven Princes of Hell: Mammon, the demon of greed; Belphegor, the demon of sloth; Satan, the demon of anger; Beelzebub, the demon of gluttony; Lucifer, the demon of pride; Asmodeus, the demon of lust; and Leviathan, the demon of envy.
I think the money in another person’s pocket is meant to be in mine.
Last week, a woman dropped her wallet on the sidewalk. I picked it up, and I wanted to take her money.
When I think of myself as a grown man, if I haven’t made the vow of poverty, I’ll live in a house where I
can sit in an armchair looking over the world through a wide, wide window. I will listen to music playing from a very expensive stereo. I might want to make money without working. I’d own a big luxury car, one of those British kinds, a Bentley or Rolls-Royce, which would be like driving around in my living room.
Mammon rubs his hands.
I want to confess to the things that make me cry. I don’t have to say why they make me cry. They just do. Music. Beauty. My headaches. Poverty. The hungry. The sick and crippled. The bullied. The grieving. The raped and murdered. My mother’s loneliness. The impossibility of you. Haven’t I made you up?
These things beat me up. They make me bleed, and they bruise me. My body hurts. Some days, because of all the pain, I beg my mother to let me stay in bed. I won’t go to school. I won’t get up until after noon. My body hurts. I know my legs will break if I try to stand. So I stay in bed, thinking, not even reading. I write poems. I cry. I sleep. I become one with the bed, rooted. I’m a sort of mushroom.
I’ve wanted to kill myself.
I can hear the crying, soothing Belphegor who lies down next to me and holds my eyes shut.
I want to confess to the things that make me angry. The men who stare at my mother like she’s a steak dinner. Car horns. Sirens. Crowds. Going to school, even though I can basically do what I want when I’m there. The fact I cry so easily. Physical pain. My bleeding and my hidden purpose.
I get angry if I have to stand in line for any reason. Angry at people who leave their dogs tied up outside no matter what the weather is. Angry in the heat. Angry when people litter. Angry if I have to answer the phone while my cereal gets soggy in milk.
I get mad at babies who cry, but I also get mad at babies who laugh. Barking dogs. Lawn mowers. Leaf blowers. Current events. Past events. Future events, like the end of the world when our sun finally gets tired of it all and explodes.
It’s bad enough I get angry at so much. I’m sure it’s more. It’s how big my anger gets. Sometimes, it takes up all of me. My bones are made of anger, my veins and arteries, my eyes, my brain, my organs. Am I made from anger? It seems bigger than me, twice as big as me, and I want to crumple everything into a little ball, including myself, and throw it away. Satan commands it.
I’ve been known to eat until I make myself sick. I drink a gallon of milk every two days. I eat cereal by the bushel. I eat and eat and drink and drink. The whole time, Beelzebub snorts and burps.
Lucifer stands behind me. I have more intelligence, talent, physical strength, height, and speed than any other boy my age. You will know me as a king, a kind of god, able to do anything, think anything. Erik.
I can do anything except ask a girl out. So, Asmodeus, constantly licking his lips, and I have to watch Gemma Burns from far away. Her beauty and body make me dark, almost angry, and she stands under the arm of a false king, Sam McHugh.
Gemma isn’t you. I know it. But I want Gemma to be mine, and for Sam to turn to sand. Green Leviathan roars.
Salve
THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS have their answer in the Seven Heavenly Virtues.
The woman dropped her wallet. I shouted, Ma’am, Ma’am, even though I could see the bills in their slot, feel the weight of the change, and I returned it, even though I wanted to run with it. The woman who dropped the wallet was old. She walked with a cane in one hand, and she might have lost the wallet from her other, trembling hand, or from her pocket. Her eyes were watery, and her mouth was folded in on itself. If I’d known at the beginning where this wallet came from, I would never have thought to run with it, to steal it for myself.
“Oh, how stupid,” she said. “Careless.”
I wanted to help her walk, but she limped off on her own, talking to herself.
I thought, It shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t steal from anyone, young or old, or pray for easy money.
I can’t claim all the credit for it, but I didn’t hang myself or cut myself open in a tub. No matter how sad I get, or agitated, or storm-driven, I always do get up. I walk. I remember my mother. I remember you are in this world for me, and I am in this world for you. I remember whatever God might be, and I think about what has to get done. I have to do what’s next on the list—go to school, help my mother, feed the hungry—and I have to do it awake.
I hear the sirens and the car horns, and I close my eyes and breathe.
The graying wolves see my mother as the alpha female, the one and only she-wolf who fed Romulus and Remus. She is that mythical and that beautiful. They can’t help themselves. They’re men. They lust. They’re greedy, they’re gluttonous, and my mother is a woman who attracts the best and worst in them. They want Rome. I know this, and I have to forgive them for their looks and comments and desires, even if I find nothing more insulting and dangerous. They want Rome.
I eat and eat, and I drink and drink, but I don’t throw food away. The plates get licked clean. I finish everything, and my mother says I’m a growing boy. I feed the hungry at the shelter at St. Barnabas, and when I’m there, no matter how starving I am, I don’t take a bite of food. I told my mother in a note, No more sweet cereal. I keep a fast between eight at night and seven the next morning. A long time ago, I gave up salt.
I love my mother. She reminds me that nobody is perfect. She tells me my father drank, sometimes too much, and they’d decided to face the problem together. Then he died. I wanted to ask if she thought he might have been drunk the afternoon he died, or if he’d ever ridden his bicycle with me after he’d been drinking, but I don’t want to know.
I imagine the driver of the car who hit my father horrified when he saw a man on his bicycle wobbling or swerving out into the intersection without looking. The driver might not have been able to do a thing, all of it happening so fast. Can you see the grief? The real driver left the scene, but imagine getting out of a car and coming around front and seeing a full-sized man bleeding and gasping in the street, all but dead. I might throw up on the spot or start crying.
What last thought went through my father’s mind? I’m sure, thinking of it now, he died in the street or in the ambulance. What was his last thought?
“Are all these bright lights for me?”
“Thank God Erik wasn’t in the basket. You would’ve lost everything, Magda.”
“I lost my hat. Has anyone seen my hat?”
“Cold.”
“Sky.”
I go to St. Barnabas. I know one or two of the men who get their meals there must have been the smartest and fastest and most talented boys at sixteen. A man named Kermit I’ve met only once, supposedly went to Yale Law at nineteen only to come here for his food. His daughter drowned. “And my son,” he said, “he must be your age, but he’s—. I don’t know what to do about anything. I’ve lost my way.”
The men at the kitchen have their stories and sadness, and I wonder if they suffer demons.
Gemma Burns cried on my shoulder when Sam McHugh forgot Valentine’s Day. “I don’t want to hear anything,” she said. “I don’t want to hear you say a word to me, and I know you won’t. But you’ll listen, and if I ask you, you’ll write me a note. I know you’re smart. Maybe I should always have been with you.”
I dropped my head.
“I know you like me, Erik.” She wore her hair in a bun so you could see her neck and shoulders, including the birthmark about three inches from her neck just below her collarbone. She’s already a woman. I listened. She told her sad story of neglect, and I realized even the most beautiful girl can be left crying with the wrong guy.
I took out a piece of paper and a pen, and I wrote something like this. We’re young. Take a deep breath and go shine your light. Happy Valentine’s Day.
Gemma read the note. Then she asked a very, very good question: “Why don’t I shine my light on you?”
I held my pen over the paper, shaking for what felt like a year. I thought about asking her to a m
ovie. I imagined kissing her, and I wondered for a moment, a split second, if she could be you after all. I finally wrote. Your light’s too bright for me, Gemma. You’re too glittery. You should be with a boy who talks, and every word he says should be your name.
She took the note, read it, folded it carefully, and slid it into her white pleather purse. “Here’s the problem with you,” she said. “You just wrote the most amazing thing, the perfect thing. What girl doesn’t want a compliment like that? But you’re saying you won’t have me. Or you think I won’t have you.” She shook her head at me: “You’re so dumb. I don’t understand you at all. You don’t want me with Sam. I know you don’t want that. All you have to do is take a walk with me or ask me to a movie. We could sit together without saying a word the whole time.”
Gemma twisted the strap of her purse in her hands. “I talk enough for the two of us,” she said. “But when I shut up, we’ll kiss. You’re the best-looking boy in school, even if you’re the weirdest. What are the chances of that? The weirdest boy is also the smartest, biggest, and cutest. It’s not like I haven’t thought about you already. It’s not like I don’t wonder what you’d be like.”
She took one more breath and sighed. “Nobody would mess with you if we went out together. You’re huge and crazy.”
Wait, I wrote. Crazy?
“Come on, Erik,” she said. “You know you are. This can’t be a surprise. It’s part of what makes you you.”
I shook my head and wrote, I don’t know if I’m crazy, but I can’t figure out anything. I want to concentrate. That’s all.
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