The Pinstripes: A Novel of Crime and Horror

The Pinstripes

A Novel of Crime and Horror

CHAPTER 1:  NIGHT

I can’t tell you the exact number.  I can only say many men crowd around my bed.  They are the same.  Not similar, but they are the same in every detail.  They wear dark blue pinstripe suits, white shirts with stays anchoring their collar points flat, red foulard ties with loose half-Windsor knots.  They comb their hair neatly, straight back; it shines and appears greasy in a forties or fifties manner, as if freshly pomaded with Brylcreem.  Gray streaks their thinning hair and white scalp shows through.  They have the beginnings of widows’ peaks. 

They are tall men, towering giants from my low perspective.  But they are more than tall; they are elongated in an unnatural way, like an army of Modigliani figures.  I am lying on my bed with the covers pulled up, covering my chin, just below my lips.  I do not like the covers over my mouth, certainly not over my nose, for then they suffocate me; if not that, then they may impede my breathing when the terror strikes me.  I do want very much to pull them over my head.  I can’t, but I ache to.  It is a dilemma, and I struggle every night to maintain them in their proper place.

They, The Pinstripes as I call them, loom above me, and completely surround my bed.  I sleep in a double bed.  I am single, so I don’t need such a large bed.  But I require the additional room.  I am not a toss-and-turn sleeper; I don’t budge once I am settled in bed.  I can’t, you see, because if I do, I might touch one of them.  I sleep in the precise center of the bed.  Avoiding contact, even the potential for contact, is the reason I like my double bed and why I sleep in the exact middle.  I have never touched one; I don’t ever want to touch a Pinstripe.

They stand straight, military ramrods at attention, apart from their cantilevered heads.  They hang their heads over me, arched slightly like the lamps suspended over streets on the tips of stanchions.  They hang their heads, I surmise by their intense scrutiny, to observe me better.  Not all of them, you understand; just those in the first two, maybe three rows.  The rest, the men in the back rows, the rows upon rows, are perfectly straight as from their vantage points viewing me is easier from perfectly erect positions.

They talk to me.  All talk to me in unison; no, what I really mean is they talk at me.  Sound issues from their mouths and washes over me.  The sound is the same from every mouth.  It is the same in every way possible.  It starts at the same time.  It is in the same cadence.  Pauses occur in the same places.  Tonality is precisely the same.  None of the words, if they indeed are words, not a one is intelligible.  Every night I am immersed in an ocean of mumbles. 

I want to demand of them, “Why are you here?  What are you saying to me?  What do you wish from me?”

However, I cannot.  In fact, I cannot articulate a sound, not so much as a murmur.  I try; I have tried, and mightily when the first Pinstripe appeared, followed by his twin, by their triplet, and on and on, until reaching beyond the horizon were more Pinstripes than people on Earth, than people who ever populated Earth, and, I guess, more than the unrevealed beings in the farthest quadrants of the universe. 

As you can imagine, going to bed is difficult for me.  “Difficult” is understating my dread about bedtime.  Bedtime terrorizes me.  In the beginning, it was worse, though the raw fright of knowing I have to lie down remains powerful.  Now, though, the sharpest edge is dulled.  After all, a score of years has elapsed since the first Pinstripe — the fellow who stands opposite my head on the right — materialized from the void of night. 

(How do I know this Pinstripe is the original, if all the others are exact copies?  Truth is, I don’t.  I deduce that he is because he is the first Pinstripe to appear once my head touches my pillow.  I reason he is the first, the granddaddy; and if I could push a word past my lips, or even formulate a question in my mind and communicate telepathically, he is the one with whom I would speak.)

Over the years, I have developed an approach to bedtime, a way to prepare, to procrastinate the inevitable.  Once, after one or two years under the disturbing gaze of The Pinstripes, I was compelled to seek help, professional counsel, as they say.  He was a psychiatrist.  They, those who forced me to get help, wanted somebody who could dispense medicine, if I needed it.  Then I suspected I did.  At the time, they deluded me with the notion that I was a lunatic. 

Anyway, not to get ahead of myself, the psychiatrist labeled my actions a ritual.  Over the years, he surmised, I had developed a bedtime ritual, growing into an obsession; I could not climb into bed and get a good night’s rest without my ritual.  Now I am a proper person who places much value on personal decorum.  There I sat on the psychiatrist’s sofa when his diagnosis struck me, really like a gunshot.  It nearly toppled me off and onto his fine oriental carpet.  Of course, I did nothing of the sort.  I politely, respectfully mumbled.  And he prescribed no medicine.  Instead, he advised me to break from my ritual by eliminating one small aspect each week, thereby demonstrating to myself that I did not require a ritual in order to sleep.  I thanked him politely for his suggestion.

I prepare for sleep as everyone does, in the same manner each night.  Bedtime for me is ten, for I like to rise at six every day, including weekends.  You could call me a man of routine; others have; I take no offense; routine provides life with a reliable rhythm.  I relish the familiar.

I start by removing my daytime clothes.  I’ve always been a firm believer in neatness.  Everything has a proper place, at least in my apartment.  If I plan to wear a garment again — I usually insist on wearing shirts twice, slacks for five days, underwear and socks once only — I hang it in my closet.  I won’t go into the details of closet organization, but will leave it at this:  Shirts hang above slacks.  My reasoning is apparent:  You wear shirts on the top half of your body and slacks on the bottom.  Nothing could be more logical than shirts hanging on top and slacks on the bottom.  I am very reluctant to give not an inch of ground on this.  Not an inch.

Once I remove every stitch and dispose of each correctly, I enter the bathroom.  I understand many people can’t bear to be naked, even alone in their own homes.  They feel vulnerable after shedding their clothing.  I know, as sometimes I feel this way myself.  However, nakedness gives you a delicious sense of freedom, and I cherish the sensation.  By no means or measure am I an exhibitionist, and I am always careful to keep the shades drawn tight.  Nobody can see in, unless they break a window to sneak a peek.  I am pleased to report I have a particularly strong constitution.  Some may not like nakedness because of the cold.  Though I keep my apartment cool in the bitter winters plaguing the city in which I live, I am perfectly comfortable.  I could live anywhere but have chosen the north because of the coolness.

In my bathroom, I floss by teeth, usually twice.  Yes, it sounds extravagant, perhaps indulgent; however, I often discover myself in a reverie halfway through flossing and, if I am working on the lower teeth, I can’t remember if I’ve done the uppers.  Many times, I am envisioning bedtime, recounting the various actions I have to take in order to assure myself a modestly restful night. 

I like sliding into my bed clean; however, I have not bathed at night since I was a boy.  Showering in the morning is more efficient; after all, I am leaving the house and mingling with people, and I do not wish to risk body odor.  Besides, not to be too personal about things, I empty my bowels in the morning; I always shower after moving my bowels; not doing so seems, well, not human, very animalistic.  I often wonder about God when I am relieving myself.  I wonder how literally we should take the idea we are created in his image?  What do they mean by image?  I certainly can’t picture God squatting on a celestial commode.  After all, how perfect would He be?  I try not to get hung up on things like this, but it is hard not to.

But to get back on track now, I clean myself with a damp face cloth, under my arms, my neck, my face.  As a matter of course, I rarely venture below my chest.  I reserve the nether regions for the shower; I prefer entering my bed calm and composed.

Prepared, I straighten up the bathroom, switch off the light, and enter my bedroom.  The room is brightly lit.  I have four lamps in the room, two on the nightstands flanking my bed, and two in the opposite corners.  When I am not in my bed, I keep my apartment fully lit night and day.  While I am a conservative person, I find it best to maintain a high wattage dwelling, for The Pinstripes abhor bright light.  They venture forth in dimness, in the dusk of evening, for example, or on particularly gloomy days, of which we have many in this part of the country in the winter months.  Bright light holds them at bay.  This is why, eventually, when I have the means, I will move to a brighter place.  But still cool, of course.  Or I may choose to live in two locations alternately depending on the seasons.

In my bedroom, I put on my pajamas.  Whatever the season, I wear the same style pajamas.  They are flannel.  They cover every part of me, from neck to feet.  They are like long johns and have footsies.  They are bright white.  I like white, and I always wear white socks.  Wearing white socks makes life much easier.  Not because they are white (though I do worship the pristine character of white), but wearing the same color reduces stress.  (I wear the same outfit — Henley shirt, kakis, and topsiders everyday for the same reason.  I’ve read many times of famous, highly accomplished men who followed this practice.  I am in good company, I believe.) 

After my pajamas, I fit my sleeping cap over my head.  It is a skullcap, tight fitting like a bathing cap, and it is matching white.  Finally, I slip on my light cotton gloves of the type Hollywood butlers used in movies to check how well movie maids had dusted the manse.  These are white, of course.  I wear these in case, through some miscalculation on my part, I accidentally touch a Pinstripe; they are protection, as is everything I wear to bed.

Prepared, I switch off the lights in the corner, followed by the bedstead lamp on the left side of my bed.  At the left side of my bed, I carefully fold down the counterpane and the two blankets and top sheet under it.  I like forming a perfect isosceles triangle.  I am quite practiced at creating the exact proportions; but if I miss the mark by any degree, I have to remake the bed and again fold down the counterpane, two blankets, and top sheet.  I can recall only a handful of instances when I’ve had to repeat myself three times.  The most recent occurrence was last year.  I was very nervous that night last year.  I encountered a new neighbor in the hall.  The woman had moved into the apartment next to mine, an apartment with the bedroom that abutted mine.  I exercised extreme care that night to be very quiet, hoping The Pinstripes wouldn’t act out of character and really, really provoke me, and force me to react badly.

Once I complete the folding, I slide into bed and position myself in the very center.  I carefully pull the counterpane, two blankets, and top sheet over me.  I lie on my back and tug the covers just over my chin, resting the top edge in the valley between my chin and my lips.  With the covers over me perfectly, I edge my right arm from under the covers and toward the backboard, where I have positioned an extension cord, which I have connected to the lamp sitting on the right bedstead table.  I switch off the right bedstead light. 

Since I have already said I keep my apartment brightly lit throughout the day and night, why don’t I simply don’t sleep with the lights on?  Wouldn’t this prove an effective defense against the spawning Pinstripes?  Alas, I have to answer, no, it would not, and it would cost me the modicum of rest I manage to obtain.  The very action of my climbing into bed with the intent of sleep signals them to approach.  I can sleep in their presence.  Yes, it is always an interrupted, disturbed, and ultimately unsatisfying sleep, but some rest nonetheless.  Unfortunately, while lights do not always hold them at bay, the brightness always prevents me from sleeping as much as a wink, rendering me less useful the next day.

So, with the lights off, I lie and wait.  Typically, within a minute of dousing the lights, The Pinstripes appear.

How they present themselves has transformed over the years, evolved you might say.  In the very beginning, after the first and second and third visitation the number topped at about fourteen, enough to line both sides of my bed, as well as its head and foot.  How can The Pinstripes squeeze into the sliver of space between the headboard and the wall?  The physical limitations of the world do not impede The Pinstripes is the only answer I can offer.  If you’re envisioning pallbearers around a coffin, I have imaged the same funereal scene.  I must admit it was frightening, seeing The Pinstripes for the first time, and visualizing the spectacle of my own carting off to the grave.  As the nights passed, their numbers increased.  Early on, an additional row of Pinstripes appeared on the order of once a week.  After the first six months, they filled the entire bedroom, so that if I’d left the lights on anyway I would not have been able to see the lamps in the far corners.

Earlier, I described The Pinstripes in detail, though I have never seen them in light of any sort.  The Pinstripes are odd in this respect:  I can see them clearly, distinguish their features, down to discerning the stitching in their clothing, without the benefit of light.  After years of observing them and being observed by them, I admit I cannot describe my ability to see them clearly, in such sharp focus as if medical floodlights illuminated them, as anything but strange and inexplicable. 

Speech is yet another mystery.  As I have already said, The Pinstripes talk at me.  But I cannot comprehend one word they are saying, or even if they are saying words.  They talk, mumble really.  I watch their lips move in unison, in eerie uniformity, a bizarre display to which I have adapted.  Yet, I cannot distinguish a single word.  I have to think of their chant as words, for I can’t imagine anything else.  It’s like listening to a vast chorus recite softly in a foreign language; no, better, a dead language like Latin.

In the beginning, I tried mightily, to my own detriment, to understand them.  Yes, for nights, for interminable nights, I screamed at them; I yelled; I shouted.  They didn’t respond; not one of them spoke distinctly to me.  I swore at them.  I hurled at them every disgusting, degrading imprecation that ever nested in my brain, but to no avail.  I resorted to inventing original, oral battering rams.  Again, they ignored my outbursts.

I succeeded, though, in attracting the attention and concern of my fellow apartment dwellers.  Policemen knocked on my door one evening unheard by me as I was preoccupied with my assault on The Pinstripes, my crusade to force them into revealing their intent towards me.  I only knew about the police when they entered my bedroom, flicked on a light, and unknowingly disbursed The Pinstripes.  Oh, yes, my phantoms of the night are cowardly bullies.

The two policemen were startled when I thanked them for driving away The Pinstripes.  They asked if I had relatives whom I might call as they believed I needed support and family would best provide it.  I stared at them.  Their suggestion nearly brought tears to my eyes, but I restrained myself thinking it inappropriate for an adult man to cry in the presence of authority for what seemed no reason. 

I had ample reason to shed tears over my family for both my parents are dead — long, long dead.  Their deaths were a great sadness to me, an incubus, you understand.  Their deaths haunt me every single day of my life.  They died senselessly.  I do believe death can be meaningful, beneficial, and ennobling, for I have known endings scaling to this higher order.  But theirs was not!

My parents died when I was a mere boy, only ten.  The season was Christmas.  They’d asked my aunt, my mother’s sister, a very lovely woman but a bit too controlling for my temperament, to baby sit me.  I suspect I have not married because of my aunt; I see her manipulative nature in most women.  Women want to run my life.  Please don’t take this as a sweeping generalization about women, as my psychiatrist did.  However, all women I have ever encountered have had as their main aim in life the gaining of control over me.

My parents enlisted my aunt to sit me, as they were attending the Christmas party given by my father’s company.  My father was a telecommunications engineer employed by a phone company.  The company treated him well, and my mother and me by extension.  In no way do I hold it responsible for what occurred after the party. 

Now it would be easy to think my father had drunk too much and got into the car thoroughly soused.  Or that my mother was too dimwitted or timid or both to seize the keys and drive.  Immediately after the accident some suggested just this. 

And the son, some thought, he’s not a bright bulb himself, and a strange one to boot.  He should have sued the phone company regardless.  It was their party and booze that ultimately did in the parents, wasn’t it?

Truth was both my parents were as close to abstainers as people could be.  They were bone dry.  They kept no alcohol in our house, and they rarely drank.  Unfortunately, the man driving the truck they encountered after leaving the party did not share their rectitude regarding alcohol. 

It was an unusual December.  While winter was often brutal where I grew up, the year they died was sufficiently warm to produce only slushy rain.  The conditions the night they left the party were rainy, sleety, and generally miserable.  Moments after departing they encountered the inebriated man and his truck.  My father must have come up behind it quickly, though normally he was careful of his speed.  It was at this very moment, when the truck struck a large mud-filled pothole.  The man wasn’t well off, and it was his truck, and he could not afford the most basic items for it, and a basic he could not afford were mud flaps.  So his rear wheels pitched gooey mud onto the windshield of my parent’s car, blinding my father, who veered off the road to avoid rear-ending the truck, turning directly into a telephone phone he could not see through his mud-plastered windshield.  My parents died instantly, or so the police claimed.  I know for a fact that nobody dies instantly.

While the man did not slam into my parent’s car, certainly their death was his fault.  He admitted as much to the police.  Still, he went free after serving a short sentence, paying a measly fine and having his license revoked for a year.  Perhaps he suffered pangs of conscience; but I can’t say for I never heard from him, and didn’t know him, except by way of the sketchy description provided by my relatives.  Perhaps if this accident has occurred later, when I was older, then things would have turned out differently for the man.

I use the descriptor “accident” with great reservation.  The man who killed my parents was drunk.  Had he not been in that condition he may have noticed the pothole that caused the tragedy.  I told everybody as much; but I was a child.  In my youth, people paid far less attention to the opinions of children than they do now.  The authorities opined any reasonable person, impaired or not, would not have anticipated the consequences that resulted from driving over a pothole.  After all, didn’t people drive over potholes millions of times a year without similar dire consequences?  As I grew older, I thought of going home and seeking out the man.  But I haven’t, and I can’t say why.  Maybe it’s just a case of leaving well enough alone.

Now, as for those policemen who called on me shortly after The Pinstripes appeared, they said I should quiet down.  If they had to return, they warned they might have to take me away.  They suggested I needed medical help.  I agreed.  I agreed and thanked them profusely.  I agreed and agreed and thanked and thanked as I ushered them out the door, out of my life, out to another call, out, out, out, the same way I wanted to push The Pinstripes out.  Out.  Out.

After they left, I went into the kitchen.  I heated water.  I placed a tea bag in the boiling water.  It was a bag of green tea.  I’m a firm believer in healthful living, and green tea is a healthful beverage.  I drank my green tea slowly.  I sipped quietly.  I don’t like slurping or people who slurp.  I carefully controlled how I drank my green tea, each sip a thoughtful act on my part — a meditation on the beverage’s delightful fragrance.

I washed my cup in the sink and placed it on the drying rack.  I also thoroughly washed the kettle in which I boiled the water.  My policy is to wash everything I use, even if it seems clean.  Boiling clean water in a washed pot seems clean; but do we really know what is in the water?  Nothing in the world is clean.  I live in an unclean world and if I wish for things around me to be clean, I must clean them. 

I went to bed.  The Pinstripes came almost immediately.  I slept fitfully.  And then, as always, it was a new day.

 

CHAPTER 2:  WORK

I like starting my day early.  However, I have not allowed the alarm clock to rule my life.  Early on, before The Pinstripes began calling on me, I removed the clock radio from my bedroom.  Its red digits disturbed me.  Even dimmed, they were like the eye, the poked eye, of an angry Cyclops.  I couldn’t sleep in the glare of the fierce red eye.

Fortunately, I am biologically perfectly attuned to nature.  When the sun rises, I rise with it.  (And, unfortunately, when the sun sets, great weariness consumes me, and I summon every fiber of my strength to remain awake.  Keeping my apartment brightly lit helps me remain awake for the longest possible time, and prevents me from dozing before my normal bedtime.  Otherwise, I would find The Pinstripes surrounding me sooner, looming over me, and haunting me longer.)

I lift the counterpane, two blankets, and top sheet.  I fold them over with great care to form the isosceles triangle, and I slip out slowly.  My first task, always my first, is the making of my bed.  While I have not had the privilege of serving my country as a member of the military (due entirely to medical reasons and not lack of desire, for I am a true blue patriot), I have always admired the Services, especially their emphasis on discipline and repetitiveness, cleanliness and neatness.  Accordingly, I wash my sheets once a week without fail.  I make my bed to rigid military standards (favoring the most rigorous Service, the Marines, as my standard), and I repeat these routines week after week and day in and day out.  After my morning tasks, it is time to shape up myself.

I am a firm believer in exercising the human body.  How anybody can expect to lead a slim and healthy, ergo long, life without physical exertion is beyond my comprehension.  Many times I have contemplated joining a health club; however, I must admit I am not a people person.  Please don’t misunderstand me:  I like people, but at a distance.  Ever since the sudden departure of my sweet brother and my parents, I have found it best to avoid entanglements (though I have not been entirely successful at this).  In the same vein, I would dearly love to charge from my apartment building and trot up and down the streets of my neighborhood.  Again, though, there is the issue of people.  I simply cannot bear the idea of turning myself into a spectacle.  I find it difficult to resist gawking at people striding up and down my street; I try, but I have no luck reining in my gaze; and I imagine if I allowed it I would easily become the object of ogling — the subject of probing eyes and what follows:  internal commentary on the studied object, its form, dress, speculation on what it is thinking, if it thinks, and so on.

I confine my exercise to inside my apartment.  I own three pieces of exercise equipment.  I have a handgrip, a “V” shape spring with plastic grips.  I squeeze it one-hundred times with my right hand and one-hundred times with my left hand.  I’ve been at it for several years and the results are phenomenal.  You would not want to engage in a battle of grips with me for fear I’d crush your knuckles.  I’m confident on this matter as, unfortunately, I injured a workmate who would not heed my warning.  He insisted and persisted in grasping my hand more firmly than necessary every time we met.  Frustrated, I gripped his hand very hard, treated him to my vice grip.  He howled.  The next time I encountered him, his forefinger was in a splint.  On the positive side, he never again shook or attempted to shake my hand; a nod sufficed.

After strengthening my grip, I climb on my exercycle.  I ordered it directly from the major manufacturer of health club equipment.  While it was expensive, almost ridiculously so, it was more than worth it.  I benefit from a superior workout each and every day and can’t recommend purchasing professional machinery too highly. 

As to my third exercise machine?  It is a vacuum cleaner.  This will certainly surprise most people, who view it as a woman’s workaday tool, but not an exercise machine.  So allow me to explain.  Cleaning the house vigorously and thoroughly is among the best forms of exercise for you, with the residual benefit of a clean residence.  May I share a bit of vacuum cleaning lore with you?  Once, quite a while ago, during a typically imbecilic interview, a reporter asked Raquel Welch how she maintained her magnificent figure.  Surely, she must devote hours to exercise?  She replied she didn’t do much of anything formally; however, she did clean her house regularly and recommended the activity as the best possible exercise, and productive too.  I don’t clean my apartment everyday, only on Saturdays, working from the moment I climb out of bed until early evening, usually around seven, when I prepare my dinner.  (I’m also a proponent of hard scrubbing.  It is even more effective than vacuuming!)

After rising and making my bed, I dress in my exercise clothing.  It is nothing elaborate like you see advertised in magazines or on television.  I exercise in a T-shirt, gray fleece-lined pants (the same in every season), white socks (I do love white next to me, on my skin), and sturdy black leather track shoes.  First, I do a series of floor exercises, including many crunches.  A well-conditioned torso is the key to a good workout and a healthy body.  Second, I mount my exercycle and pedal for a solid hour.  I can cover the equivalent of twenty-five miles.  I have a small apartment, consisting of one bedroom, a living room that includes a small dining alcove, and a kitchen.  I keep my exercycle in my living room, near the window, where I can gaze at the sky and the street, observe the weather and the people, and generally occupy my mind as I pile up the miles.  I follow this routine every day without fail.  Even when I’m not feeling particularly well, I force myself to exercise. 

When I finish, I go into the bathroom, where I take care of my physical needs, shave, brush my teeth, and shower.  In the bedroom again, I dress in the outfit I’ve described previously.  I should amend I own Henleys in four colors:  dark blue, dark green, dark gray, and black.  I wear the same outfit each day to obviate the need to contemplate my clothing for the day.  However, having Henleys of different colors does not present a problem or represent a contradiction, for after all, a little variety has never harmed anyone.  I wear the shirts in rotation, just as I’ve listed them above.  I never vary, greatly simplifying my life.

The best way to start the day is with a good breakfast.  I eat simply and rarely does my morning fare change.  I enjoy a bowl of raisin bran with skim milk and no sugar.  I have a banana on the side and a small glass of orange juice.  I’d prefer freshly squeezed, but I can’t make the time for it.  I’ve considered purchasing a juicer, but the nuisance of it all stops me.  I complete my breakfast with a cup of decaffeinated black coffee.  Some single people drink instant coffee, or they purchase their morning cup on the way to wherever they are going.  I brew a small pot of coffee, and sometimes in the warm weather make iced coffee with the leftover for later in the day.  I despise instant coffee, even the freeze-dried variety.  And I’m too economical to purchase coffee on the run.  The prices are just outrageous.

I’m something of a purist when it comes to my plates and silverware.  I own only white stoneware and my silverware is ordinary restaurant style.  My motto is:  The simpler the better.  Simple is best.  Simple spawns few problems.

In keeping with my guileless philosophy, I’m happily single.  Women are complex and they complicate every nook and cranny of your life.  I know, as I’ve had a girlfriend.  For certain reasons, I cannot divulge her full name.  I like to think of her as Eve, though Eve was not her name.

Eve was a beautiful woman.  She was tall and slim, willowy, like a reed, swaying when she walked or even just stood; she was never still, possessed of tectonic energy.  Her complexion was as smooth, clear, and glossy as porcelain, an expression of Southern ideal, though she was not from the South.  She wasn’t translucent, by which I mean nowhere were her veins visible through her skin, a condition I would find disconcerting. 

Eve was dark, which may strike you as a contradiction.  Her hair was black, Oriental in its ebony shade.  It was wavy, and she wore it long, hugging her head as snugly as a veil and draping to her waist.  Her eyes were deep set, like delicate, secret caves; I stared into them for hours, attempting to penetrate them, to see into her, hoping to comprehend her and her reactions to what I said, what I did.  But, I have to confess, I could extract nothing for her eyes conveyed none of her feelings, none of her thoughts. 

As for her nose, it was aquiline, and her lips were full, puffy pillows, extremely soft, and naturally moist and red.

Eve was a woman who shunned makeup, or adornments — earrings, necklaces, or brackets.  Nor did clothing interest her, so I believed at first.  For she was like me in the regard of dress:  She wore a similar outfit every day — a long black dress decorated with subtle, vertical chalk striping cinched at the waist with a wide, fine-tooled black leather belt, inlaid with silver.  Some days she wore black boots with moderate heels; other days she wore black pumps, the heels of which were never more than two inches.  As time passed and our familiarity with each other increased, I realized her choice of dress was anything but indifferent; she considered it, and her appearance, quite carefully as her means of conveying an attitude. 

As to what this was, I was never sure.  She did remind me of the caricature of a twentieth-century beatnik.  She was intellectual, conversant with philosophers and their philosophies, and writers and their great works, playwrights, and so on, like that.  I learned much from her.  For instance, who was the first philosopher?  It was a Greek, naturally, a fellow named Thales. 

She was, however, more rebel than deep thinker.  Yes, she was a vessel of vast knowledge, but to what purpose?  From time to time, I believed she acquired her knowledge to subvert authority, any authority:  parental, school, city, state, federal.  Her outward appearance was a perfect expression of her apartness from society.  For example, when Eve and I were a couple, colorful, well-fitted clothing was the style.  The idea was to look young to compliment feeling and acting young.  Nobody could dampen a good time faster than Eve.  Without a word, with just her dour gaze and austere, funereal dress, she destroyed good times like a black hole destroys solar systems. 

In short, I discovered Eve was inscrutable.  Suffice to say at this point I could not live with her impenetrable personality.  Eve and I are no longer one.  Besides, we’d been something of an odd couple, what with me in my Henleys and kakis and she in her crepe; the preppy and his Goth.

But never mind Eve for the moment, because my purpose here is relating my day.  After breakfast, it is time for me to leave.  I confess to mixed emotions about leaving.  Truthfully, I feel safest in my apartment, and most threatened.  Daytime is a safe time for me as The Pinstripes never — have never as yet I should say — approached me during the day.  I could easily remain in my apartment and be secure and comfortable the entire day.  Like most people, though, I have to earn a living.  My parents were not poor people, and they left me with a sizable estate.  It is sufficiently substantial for me to live modestly without working.  While modest living is my keynote, I don’t believe my inheritance would last my entire lifetime, for I am yet a young man in my thirties.  (I find contemplating my age sad and depressing for, inevitably, it reminds me of the grim prospect awaiting me.)  Thus I must leave my apartment to work.

My work isn’t far away.  I am not an aficionado of travel.  When my parents were living, they took me and my brother on summer vacations.  I did not enjoy these excursions, taken exclusively by auto.  As the death of my parents’ demonstrate, travel, and in particular by auto, is extremely dangerous.  Public transportation isn’t a solution for me, either.  It does nothing to eliminate the danger and, in fact, it compounds the chance you will not arrive home.  By this, of course, I mean you may discover yourself on the wrong end of a mugging.

Thus, I live within a city block of my work.  Yes, that I may be battered as I travel to or from work is a possibility, at least I’m not riding a conveyance either driven by an individual on the verge of madness, or on a vehicle destined to crash for want of proper maintenance.  I have navigated my route successfully, unscathed, for a couple of years.

I admit my job isn’t much of anything, pays what most would regard as a pittance, and certainly would not challenge the intellect of an eighth-grader.  However, with weighty concerns and much to mull over, it is perfect for me, with the added perk of rendering me somewhat invisible.  I am a facility laborer.  My employer, whom I choose to leave nameless, sells small articles — personalized pens, towels, tableware, and the like — in the mail and over the Internet.  Although the business sounds insubstantial because its goods sound like trivial things, it is not.  I work for a billion dollar enterprise, and my group is a single part of a much greater whole.  As facility laborer, I have a myriad of jobs.  I process our in-house mail in the mailroom.  Management likes, for whatever reason known only to them, to reorganize on a regular basis, necessitating the moving of people from old to new places in our vast building.  I help move these people.  Often reorganization requires us to disassemble office cubicles and reassemble them in new locations.  I also help in the warehouse when they need extra hands.  There I do what my company calls pick-and-pack.  I admit to enjoying the work.  Speed and accuracy are essential when picking and packing customer orders.  To hurry things along, pick-packers ride Segways.  The order fulfillment department owns a small fleet of five.  If I have to fill an order with items from the far end of the warehouse, I ride a Segway to the distant corners.  Our Segways are equipped with baskets in which we carry the goods ordered to the packing table.  Zipping through the aisles on a Segway is exhilarating in the same way as driving a car off the usual paved road is. 

Packing isn’t so bad, either.  The trick to fast packing and ultimate customer satisfaction is selecting the correct size box.  The correct size box minimizes the company’s cost, ensures the product is secure, and that it arrives in excellent condition at the customer’s home or business.

I don’t mind any of those jobs, but they are not my favorites.  My favorite is replenishing our many break and lunchrooms.  Replenishing is my main job, and I am the only facilities employee entrusted with this responsibility.  It entails roaming the company’s enormous square footage, breezing through the lunchrooms (three) and break areas (six), every place we might have a refrigerator filled with soft drinks, and ascertain if the stock is adequate.  Where inadequate, I return later and replenish the supply.  Officially, I am a facility clerk II, but how utterly bland and demeaning!  I prefer thinking of myself as Chief Replenisher.

I report to the Facility Management Room at exactly seven.  I work until twelve, when I break for a half-hour lunch, though I abstain, choosing to read instead and save the calories.  I resume at twelve-thirty and continue work until four.  I arrive home at four-ten.

My fellow workers are uninteresting people.  I try to keep my contact with them to a minimum, but I am not reclusive on the job or impolite.  However, I do maintain a distant, respectful space, between myself and them.  I am not the type of person who easily establishes relationships with others.  Working together is no reason to be friends.  Assuming so is like believing that relatives must enjoy each other’s company.  What an absurd and false notion. 

I understand my behavior is misunderstood by my workmates.  They believe I am disinterested in them (very true) and standoffish (not true).  This is not a conclusion I drew, but one thrust upon me by my supervisor.  At my first annual review, he revealed to me that my associates found my attitude cool and unfriendly.  I assured my supervisor that I was neither, but did not feel compelled to exhibit a tender side of my personality to people with whom I spent a mere few hours a day; whom I did not choose as companions; whom I had no feelings for, good or bad.  He said he understood but I didn’t believe he did, nor do I to this day.  I will concede:  He was and has been accepting. 

Men score poorly in the comradeship department.  Women, on the other hand, are of a different sort in this area.  They want to be my friends, to cozy up to me, and in some cases wish to fix me up with their friends whom they claim will be perfect companions for me.  Women want to control me. 

I am not rude.  Stamp on my toes from dawn to dusk and you will not elicit a coarse word from my mouth.  However, some circumstances demand firmness.  Not rudeness or crudeness, for I am capable of neither, ever.  I forcefully inform any woman who sidles up to me that I am happily engaged with a woman, referring to Eve.  It’s the memory of her, of course; but it is still a relationship of a type.  Though relationship may not be my favorite descriptor, as it is not a word I favor.  I find it a troubling word, because the concept of a relationship with a woman is disturbing.  I like women, but in a general way.  I don’t wish to come across as selfish, self-serving, insensitive, and all that.  I enjoy the sexual aspect of a man and woman interlocked.  On particular occasions I even derive satisfaction from conversing with women, gaining insight into their perspectives on the issues of the day.  However, I believe that women do not regard this as a relationship.  Their understanding of this concept is “married,” which is the equivalent of control.  Both “married” and “control” contain the same number of letters.  I don’t consider this coincidental.

After Eve, I was in my happy state of aloneness, except, of course, for The Pinstripes.

As for my job, it serves its purpose of supplementing my inheritance.  My parents were good and kind people.  They provided for me after their passing.  I knew almost exactly what my inheritance would be:  the value of our house; the cash on hand; the size of their bank account and their investment portfolio.  This gives the impression it is large, but it is merely adequate.  I am not wealthy, or even what most would term comfortable.  Had my parents survived to the end of their normal life span, I probably would not be restocking soda today.  But for wont of a Christmas party, passing entertainment, they deprived me of what would have been a sizeable inheritance, the inheritance to which I feel myself entitled.  I believe I was robbed because they had to fulfill a desire to attend a silly party.  Maybe their negligent self-indulgence constitutes abuse of me.  Sometimes I think so.

I sometimes mull over the prospect of independence as I replenish the kitchens scattered about the plant.  I weigh the prospect against my connection with my parents.  I wish we had enjoyed a harmonious unity.  Sorrowfully, we did not.  My parents did not understand me, and we could not relate to each other, despite their innate goodness. 

My mother was better at, and worked harder at understanding my concerns and needs than did my father, though her attempts were far from successful.  She was the smothering variety of mother, a protective woman; and as with every female I’ve encountered, she was a controller.  Reflecting on our relationship, I conclude her acts of kindness, her protestations of acceptance, her pandering, her maddening dialectic blend of permissiveness and strictness, her tears and kisses and hard right hand, all were manifestations of her sole desire:  to control my every action.  From the moment I exited her womb, she had envisioned me as a puppet.  I suppose I matured into a terrible disappointment to her.

My father was the opposite, with no expectations for me, just depression over my existence.  I did not appreciate my significance in our quad family until shortly before my parents met their unfortunate demise.  I’d assumed I’d come along after they’d tied the knot.  I’d come along sooner than pleased my father, and my promptness, to put it in the vulgar vernacular, pissed him off to no end.  He demonstrated his contempt and hatred for me by ignoring me.  Attempting to ignore someone in proximity to you is a monumental task.  You might keep it up for a day, two days, or if skilled, a week.  If the object of your averted attention is a child, well, the task is nearly impossible.  My father’s “witty” solution was to procure employment at a distance from our home.  This was not a great enough distance to warrant our moving, in his opinion, but it wasn’t close enough for him to comfortably commute from home to work daily.  He visited about twice a month over a weekend, [deleted bar reference] arriving home late, after I was tucked in and out of sight.

As I mentioned, my father worked for the phone company.  I may have said he worked as an engineer.  My recollection of him is fuzzy, as the man wasn’t around much and my mother rarely spoke of him, and, when she did, hardly in emollient language.  My father could have been an engineer, a man who galloped off to work in black pants and white shirt, wore a stringy tie, drove a Ford sedan, brought home a decent paycheck, a monthly check.  But he could easily have been a lineman, a flannel-clad man who perched with the birds, played with wire, dared death daily on the job.  Sometimes I think I am mistaken in all matters relating to my father.  He didn’t drink, for example, but perhaps he did cherish his libation and satisfied his passion often.  He was not home much, yet he could have been home quite a bit, but just invisible, the type of man who is quiet, who lets the woman do the talking and the deciding, especially when it comes to the children.

However, now that I am reflecting on him, perhaps he was an engineer who chose to be apart from us as much as he could manage.  Yes, I think I’ll vote for engineer because he seems to have made quite a lot of money, enough to provide a sizable nest egg for himself and my mother, and, unconsciously, a respectable though not entirely adequate inheritance for me.

I have to work, and so here I am at this company as Chief Replenisher and oddjobber. 

I mentioned I sometimes help in the warehouse.  The supervisor of the order processing department there has complimented me on numerous occasions and has offered me a fulltime position.  I would happily join his department, but have not for three reasons.  First, the department is large and I would feel like a cog.  I don’t like being a cog.  I want always to feel like an individual.  Second, the work is very intense.  I find I enjoy it for a couple of hours a day, but I prefer my work as a replenisher and departmental pinch hitter.  I set my own pace, for the most part, and my fellow employees are grateful to me for keeping the kitchens fully stocked at all times and for jumping in where and when needed.  Third, there was an employee in the department with whom I did not get on well. 

I’m not comfortable using the individual’s real name.  I’ll call him Adam and tell you what bothered me about him.

Adam was not an inherently bad fellow.  Really, when you think about it, most people, including those you might hold a grudge against, aren’t inherently evil; but sometimes they exhibit faulty judgment.  I guess we’re all guilty sometimes.  In many ways, Adam was much like me: tall, lanky, quiet.  You could describe us as the dark, silent types.  Both of us were hard workers.  He was competitive, which I admit I am not.  It was always a race with Adam to see who could fulfill an order fastest.  He whizzed down the aisles and around the corners on a Segway at reckless speeds.  Segways can clip along at twelve miles an hour; Adam throttled his to its limit in his quest to fulfill orders faster than anybody at the company, or in the company’s history.  This proclivity of his was not, however, why I disliked him and refused to join the department of which he was not simply a member but of which he was the star.

Adam played an electric guitar.  He was also a member of a rock n’ roll band.  In particular, he was a heavy metal rocker.  Many people enjoy this style of music, though I do not count myself among them.  Of course, I did not dislike Adam merely because we did not share musical interests.  My animosity stemmed from his attempt to steal Eve away from me, and his persistent inquiries into her whereabouts. 

Normally, I do not attend parties of any sort given by anyone on any occasion.  I am not comfortable in crowds, and I am not adept at striking up conversations with strangers or casual acquaintances.  I put my workmates in the latter category.  I tend to be circumspect, but, unfortunately, Eve possessed the ability to elicit information from me.  I suppose you could describe my behavior in her presence as fawning.  Not always, mind you.  But when she was acting indifferently to me anxiety overwhelmed me.  I would say anything, reveal secrets, and share information I might otherwise hold private just to win her approbation.  I was silly; I was no better than a hormonal teen; I was not me when her aura enveloped me.  On one of these occasions toward the end of our relationship when she was cool to me, I informed her of a company Christmas party and asked if she would like to attend with me.  I recall her response vividly.  We were in my living room.  She was seated on the sofa and I was standing by the window gazing at the street.  She sat as she usually did, on the edge of the cushion, as if at any moment she would spring up and flee.  Her carriage was that of a statue, cold, aloof, introspective, a woman in her own world, in a place far from my apartment, musing over what, I could not guess.  Her response was like an afterthought to any old mundane question, like “Would you pass the ketchup?” 

She came to my place the night of the party.  I did not, and still do not, own a car, so I could not pick her up in the traditional manner.  This bothered her not a bit, as Eve was not in any regard a traditional woman.  She appeared a half-hour late; she was never punctual, though her casual attitude about time never irked me, as it would have some.  Time is merely a human conceit and I myself try to ignore it, when I can.  We were perfectly compatible when it came to time, or, more properly, our desire to disregard it as often as was safe .

Whether she was dressed for a party or not was open to discussion.  I can say she wore different shoes, not boots, or librarian leather; rather, she shod her lovely feet in pumps cut low in the front to show the tops of her toes, mimicking low-cut bodices with cleavage the result.

The party seemed not to impress her.  It did not overwhelm me either.  I was present to satisfy a vague obligation I felt to my boss and, maybe, to Eve:  the need to treat her to a fun time, and to show her off to colleagues.  Peacock behavior, I suppose.

She did impress the party.  All of my fellow employees, men and women, found her fascinating, and I am positive no less than half the evening’s conversation revolved around Eve.  Mind you, no one actually approached her or engaged her in conversation.  But they stared and talked.

That is, until Adam invaded our cozy sphere.  It was awkward business; he cleared his throat, waiting for introductions that I would not have extended had he been a representative of American rock royalty.  He performed the honors, or I should say dishonors, himself.  In one way, the way of confirming Eve might actually have had emotions for me, was complimentary to me; the idea I could attract someone like Eve.  Of course, I did not appreciate it in the least when he led her away, deep into the warehouse.  I allowed them to leave, but followed in the shadows; I never lost sight of them.

Adam proffered a Segway and she accepted.  Then they drove up and down the aisles.  I observed from the entrance.  Eve surprised me by laughing several times, loud enough to reach me clear across the warehouse, over the mountains of racks dense with the articles we sold and shipped.  I’d basked in her smile several times, and once or twice I’d initiated the smile; but never, never, until that moment in the warehouse, had I heard a laugh issue from her mouth.  I can’t convey the depth of my feeling at that moment, the pit of my anger.  It was then I realized Eve and I could not continue.  The vision of this saddened me.

The pair zigzagged around the warehouse for how long I cannot remember.  However, it impressed me then as an eternity, and this measure of infinity is with me yet today.  They teased me horribly in this manner.  They rode the course composed of a couple of aisles, returned to their starting point, paused, stared at each other, wiggled on their Segways, laughed, maneuvered tantalizingly close, separated, and launched off onto another excursion through the aisles.  They repeated their adventure, each time running faster, more recklessly, until fear consumed me that Eve would fail to negotiate a turn, or crash head-on into Adam, who delighted in playing chicken with her.  The terror in me mounted to the volcanic and forced my party nibbles from my stomach into my throat, producing an urge to erupt in the alcove where I huddled.  When I could not stand another second of their antics, I sneaked back to the party.

I sought the corners, the darker the better, and sulked for the longest time.  The party crush had diminished to diehards, when Eve and Adam emerged though the warehouse door.  I was too upset with both of them to spring from my black den and greet them.  I hid and observed them.  I am a wonderful observer, and I prefer to watch.

With Adam, always a degenerative mess, I could detect no change.  If he had returned spiffed and polished, I would have suspected something more than Segway cruising had transpired between them. 

Eve, however, was another story.  As I’ve related, Eve was a precise woman in every regard:  cosmetics and dress no exception.  She was perfect, as always.  Not a strand of her hair was misplaced, not a wrinkle marred her clothing.  Her sparse makeup was as fresh as if she had completed her toilet moments before entering the party room and had applied the goop at her own vanity in her own boudoir. 

This, I thought, was a problem.  Perfection means attention.  After all, they’d been charging around the warehouse at Indy speed, or what passed for it on a Segway.  People cannot race Segways and step from them in better condition than prevailed when they boarded the scooters. 

And why, I asked myself, would Eve need to attend to herself unless she had a reason, unless she needed to, unless she did not wish me to see her as anything less than perfect?  Perhaps she did not want me to suspect more had transpired in the warehouse than innocent Segway racing.  Perhaps she had detected my absence.  Eve, I knew, possessed the power to sense things, including the vibrations emitted by people and objects.  Eve knew I would detect the slightest change in her, her appearance, her demeanor; anything I could view as a “tell.”

An example of my perceptiveness:  One evening early in our relationship I had served Eve a cookie.  While Eve was a sylph, she had a failing for sweets; she was susceptible to their lure.  As long as I was acquainted with her, her favorite cookie was oatmeal raisin.  She reasoned that the oatmeal and the raisins were healthful and offset the deleterious effects of the sugar, butter, and eggs in the cookie.  I argued otherwise; but Eve would hear none of it.  She and I never quite saw eye to eye on the issue of food.  I prefer simple fare, taking most of my food in its raw form.  I’m big on fresh vegetables and fruit.  I consume meat rarely, but when I do I do not cook it.  Some would say I am endangering myself, and they may be right, given the frightening reports you read in the newspapers these days.  However, I purchase my meats only from reputable butchers and never from supermarkets.  In all my years, I have never been sickened by meat.  But again, I am not indulging in animal flesh daily, just occasionally.

But back to the oatmeal cookie, Eve’s favorite.  Eve was a meticulous person.  Everything with her had to be just right.  Everything included how she deported herself eating.  She took tiny bits, nibbles like a mouse.  She suspended her open hand like an altar boy’s paten under the food and her mouth, to capture any falling crumbs before they landed on her dress, the furniture, or the floor.  As she ate, she carefully cleared any residue from her mouth with a finger.  She would not allow me see her swipe her mouth as she used her other hand to shield the lower portion of her face.  When she performed this task, if she had not finished the cookie, she placed it on the napkin draped across her lap.  Thus, she remained pristine. 

She was as careful in every other aspect of her appearance.

And yet, one time in my apartment, she perched on my sofa, having devoured a slice of plain pound cake, performed all the machinations I have described above, after which I spotted the smallest spec of yellow on the collar of her dress, up high and completely invisible to her.  At that time Eve was part of me and to hurt her would have been akin to slicing my own fingers with my chef’s knife.  Yet I wished her to understand my razor-sharp abilities, my keen perception, my unrivaled attention to detail regarding every single aspect of her person and attire.  I accomplished this by rising from my seat, walking to her, looming over her, bending slightly, and slowly, carefully, but casually, removing the crumb of yellow pound cake from her collar, indicating I’d done so in the most subtle manner by raising my finger to my mouth and flicking my tongue against my finger.

Possessing an ability to understand without words, she knew exactly what had transpired.  She communicated with wide eyes, very wide eyes that drank in my discontentment, though my expression of my feelings was so understated no normal person would have noticed:  Her messiness disappointed and offended me.

So, as you can see, Eve was fully aware of my perceptive abilities.  Consequently, before rejoining the party, she had attended to the details of her person.  She returned as the dictionary definition of perfection.  The people at Webster could easily have used line art of her to illustrate the word.  Every strand of hair was in place.  Her black pinstripe dress was immaculate and free of wrinkles, as if she’d just plucked it from the dry cleaner’s plastic bag.  Her face was flawless, and scrubbed clean of expression. 

Yet, I knew.  I knew such perfection, given what I had observed moments earlier, was impossible.  She had taken a few moments to herself to achieve the flawlessness she exhibited.  The question was:  to what purpose? 

The purpose was clear to me: She was hiding something from me, and it was more than the playful rumpling resulting from the Segway spinning in which she had engaged.  The truth of my suspicion, what rendered it fact in my mind, was the appearance of Adam.  The man was more of a wreck than usual.  The telling difference was in his face.

Adam, under his scraggly attempts at a beard — a goatee, sideburns, and other facial hair foolery — was normally pasty white, maybe even cadaver gray; usually drained and wan.  But there he stood that night, rosy.  He was like a man who’d drunk too much spiked punch.  He was glowing red.  Clearly he was overheated, excited, stimulated, aroused, and otherwise ready for or, as I thought, primed to plunge from a high.  The high was, I had no doubt, Eve.

I could only imagine what had transpired between them.  I hoped it was mere spittle from kissing.  But I feared there had been more.  Eve was simply too, too perfect.  Perfect she always was, but the perfection of that night shamed her other attempts at goddess flawlessness. 

For me, she had been a woman on a pedestal, the woman against whom to measure all others of the sex:  the ultimate creature, the only of her class whom I could contemplate as my mate, the sole person whom I could drop to my knees and worship.  And now it was as if she’d reemerged into the party room swinging a bat, and taking the bat to her pedestal, whacked it and shattered it, revealing that, after all, it wasn’t substantial but mere plaster cast, a fake.

I was angry.  She and Adam disappeared from my view.  I saw only red; red as if a malicious invader had slapped a drenched brush of scarlet paint on my face, slapped me like a cuckolded spouse in a French farce. 

I could not remain at the party, or return to Eve.

That night, I resolved to dissolve my relationship with her.  Eve and I could never enjoy a relationship again. 

I feared, too, I could never have another relationship or trust another woman.  I would not submit to their control.

I continue to work in the factory and perform the same functions.  From time to time, workmates who recall the party, which after all wasn’t too long ago, ask me about Eve and comment on her uniqueness and her beauty.  I say nothing, replying only with a blank stare, for Eve is no more for me.

Adam never asks about Eve, as he is at the company no more.  Several days after the party, he failed to show up for work.  Days passed and still Adam did not appear at work. 

No one knew what had become of him, except for me; I did, and I wasn’t saying.

 

CHAPTER 3:  SANCTUARY

My apartment and my employment aren’t my favorite places.  They are locations in my life.  I must live somewhere.  I must work somewhere.  Where I live and work is in the north; I can admit that much.  Winters are bleak and bitter here.  I need a warm place and so I have my apartment.  But I don’t occupy my apartment alone; I share it with The Pinstripes.  I sometimes wonder what the management would think if they knew literally thousands of men occupied my apartment with me! 

I like my apartment well enough.  But there is a place that I like much more.  If where I live now was warm year round, like Florida, I could take up residence in my favorite place throughout the year, if doing so didn’t give people the impression I was a strange person, or worse, a dangerous individual.  As it is, I can visit the spot only during the summer.  Sometimes I spend the night in my favorite place; but I don’t do this very often for the reason I mentioned.  In addition, to do so would require a lot of paraphernalia that I don’t own and don’t want to purchase.  I don’t really care to own more than I actually need.  Owning is a burden.  Additionally, when the time comes for me to move, it would mean transporting too many possessions; or, equally unappealing, disposing of them.  And if I am ever required to move quickly, doing so would be very difficult with a truckload of possessions.  I own some things, but I am fortunate in that I have no attachments to any of the stuff, except for the few precious items, which I store safely in a small suitcase I keep in my bedroom closet and in a box in my refrigerator.

My favorite place is several miles from my apartment.  Every once in a while, when I absolutely must I rent a car to visit it.  Most often, though, I simply take the public bus, which leaves me within easy walking distance.  I don’t mind walking in the pleasant summer weather and gladly would walk several miles.  As I mentioned, I set a premium on maintaining my physical fitness.

My favorite place has no name.  That is to say it has no formal name, which is fine with me, because, for reasons I don’t care to go into, I wouldn’t mention it here even if it had one.  It is best I keep my favorite place unnamed and secret.

My favorite place is in a forest.  In the forest is a meadow.  Running though the meadow is a stream.  I like to sit on the edge of the forest where it meets the meadow.  At this particular location, the steam squiggles by.  It is there at the edge of the forest, in the meadow, on the bank of the stream where I spend many weekends in the summer.  Truthfully, too, I am there occasionally on a weekday.  Its attraction for me is overpowering sometimes and I find myself playing hooky.  I don’t like to indulge myself too often as doing so burdens a co-worker with stocking the various kitchens.  I dislike being unkind to my co-workers, though they are not among my favorite people, as I’ve said.

On the days when I visit my favorite spot, I begin the day in my kitchen.  I enjoy my breakfast first, and then I pack a lunch for the day away.  Normally, I don’t eat lunch.  But these visits are the exception that make the rule, so to speak.  I enjoy hardly anything more than lying back, nibbling healthful tidbits, while I gaze out across my verdant heaven. 

I’m not a heavy eater, but I do enjoy an assortment of cut vegetables and fruits and plain grain bread.  I always fill the thermos with ice-cold skim milk.  The thermos is a good one, and my milk is as cold later when I drink it as when I first poured it.

I may not have mentioned this fact earlier, but I have a lunch pail.  I use it exclusively for my excursions into the country.  It is a very utilitarian lunch bucket, black, domed like a Dutch colonial house, containing my excellent thermos.  Actually, my lunch pail is a precious possession as it was my father’s.  Everyday, before he took the job away from us, he carried a lunch prepared by my mother.  I believe I can still smell his lunches, especially the fried egg sandwiches he loved.  My mother included a small packet of ketchup with the sandwich, and my father would apply it just before he ate; doing so ensured his sandwich wasn’t any soggier than necessary.  I admit that my memory and the physical evidence of its reality strongly suggests my father wasn’t an engineer; or perhaps engineers in his day behaved much like blue collar workers.  This aspect of my past confuses me, and often I promise myself I will investigate.  I would like my memory of my parents to be in precise order.

My lunch pail isn’t completely packed until I’ve opened the hatbox in my closet and the small box in the refrigerator, examined my most precious possessions, and selected at least one to include in my lunch pail with my lunch.

With all is in order, I plan my exit from my apartment and my building and my journey to the bus stop.  Perhaps my use of the word “plan” sounds odd.  When most people leave their homes or apartments, they probably stroll straight out the door without a concern. 

Unfortunately, I cannot be as carefree about leaving my abode.  I realize I have devoted much space to describing The Pinstripes and assuring you I see them only at night, only in the dark, and only in my bedroom.  I have not lied.  All the above are absolute truths.  But I never know.  I can never be sure The Pinstripes will confine their harassment of me to the dark in my bedroom.  I have to admit, as painful as the admission is, I suspect I have glimpsed a Pinstripe from time to time in the outside world on my way to my special place, to solitude and peace.  It’s as if the idea of my finding comfort offends them.  Yes, that’s the way it seems to me.

At my front door, I pause and listen.  I do not like to exit into the hallway unless it is empty.  I have lived here for several years and have managed through careful planning to avoid regular contact with my neighbors.  I do not dislike my neighbors; I simply do not wish to interact with them.  I’ve found that an occasional encounter can grow into more contact and more contact leads to the type of obligation I do not wish.  For instance, if I saw my neighbor a couple of times a week, I would have to acknowledge the person.  Eventually, we would exchange information; we would become acquainted.  Then the person would extend an invitation to stop by for coffee and conversation.  I am not a conversationalist.  No, I prefer my solitude and silence.

So, I listen.  If I hear nothing, I open my door and peer out.  I survey the corridor.  When I’ve satisfied myself the hallway is clear, I leave.

I live on the first floor.  I chose the first floor for a specific and logical reason:  First floor living allows me to enter and exit my apartment quickly without running into neighbors.  I also try always to leave at odd hours, further reducing the chance I will encounter someone.

Once on the street I feel safe, for on the street I can be anonymous.  People do not normally buttonhole you on the street, or attempt to establish a relationship with you.  The fact is, on the street, people work at avoiding you.  I am most comfortable in this environment.

The same is true of the bus stop.  You could see the same people every day at the bus stop and never have to speak to them and they will never speak to you and nobody will think this behavior peculiar.  On the contrary, chatting up a stranger at the bus stop would be extraordinary, viewed as threatening, an encroachment on highly cherished personal territory.  Nations have been known to war over intrusions like those that occur at a bus stop.

I have a strategy for my bus ride.  Whether I’m going to my favorite place or heading to work, I employ the same strategy.  Before leaving the house I gather up grocery bags I have saved.  I stuff several into one until it bulges.  On the bus, I find a seat.  Often, the bus is crowded and I have to share a seat, which I do not like to do.  I do not like an individual next to me.  But this is a city bus, so people are constantly getting on and off.  Eventually, whoever might be seated beside me leaves.  When I have the seat to myself, I scoot over to the window.  I place my bulging bag on the seat I’ve vacated, monopolizing it.  To ensure nobody comes along and asks me to move my bags so they might sit, I hum and grunt and sometimes for added insurance rock forwards and backwards.  Nobody wants to sit next to a crazy person — somebody who might be sick, who might act violently.  A person has to be desperate to summon the courage to ask the nut to make room to sit.  Of course, I’m perfectly normal, but I certainly wouldn’t want to reveal this to anybody on the bus; I cherish my solitude too much.

By car, the trip to my favorite place takes slightly more than a half hour.  However, via bus, I spend nearly an hour wending through city streets, stopping at virtually every corner, before arriving.  I have to weigh cost and speed versus savings and gained time.  I feel I must conserve my financial resources; consequently, the bus carries the day, and me. 

I am not a time waster by any means.  I read on the bus.  I enjoy popular magazines.  I especially enjoy reading about the antics of today’s personalities.  I think these people are totally divorced from reality.  They possess too much money and too much time.  Often, as I flip through the celebrity newspapers and magazines, the feeling they deserve a lesson in the life of an average person overwhelms me.  Other times I think they simply require to be remonstrated about their capricious lifestyles.  I suppose, if asked, I would volunteer to take this on.  Anyway, I occupy myself with a newspaper or magazine, and sometimes I leave the bus a bit emotional from these thoughts.

The bus stops directly outside the parking lot to the forest reserve in which is my favorite spot, the same lot in which I park the few days I drive.  Whichever conveyance I take, I arrive at the same place. 

From the bus stop or the lot, it is a trek to my favorite spot.  First, I walk down a path shared by joggers, walkers, and bicyclists.  I try to be in the reserve at times when people are at home.  I’ve measured the distance from the path entrance to the area where I diverge from the trodden way.  It is exactly six-thousand five-hundred and fifty-three feet.  I’m a snappy walker, so I can cover the distance in twelve minutes.  If I’m burdened, I require more time. 

At the six-thousand five-hundred and fifty-third footmark, I depart from the path and trek through the forest.  Where I live we have moderately tall trees, not nearly as tall as those growing on the coasts or in the Deep South.  Ours, however, are fine trees, a mix of deciduous and conifer.  I must tread through considerable undergrowth.  It isn’t always easy or pleasant, but when I have few items weighing me down it is not particularly onerous.  From the path to the edge of the forest, where the meadow commences and the stream winds by it is exactly one-thousand and thirty feet.  How do I know the precise distances?  After my first visit to the forest, when I’d selected my spot, I visited several more times with a pedometer hooked to the waistband of my kakis.  I used it a couple of times until I was certain of the distances.  I find accuracy is best as it eliminates uncertainty.  Uncertainty is a condition that creates anxiety in me, and I don’t like feeling anxious.  I have a hard time breathing when I am anxious. 

There is a small hill at the edge of the forest and it is on this hill that I usually sit.  From this vantage, I can gaze upon the meadow, the stream, and the forest.  In the summer, the landscape is wonderfully verdant.  I’ve visited in the early fall just as the leaves are changing; my spot is breathtaking then.  I’ve also visited in the spring when it is lovely pale green, fresh and new; but the weather can be terribly tricky in the springtime.  My hill can be wet.  Usually there is a chill in the air.  I find it uncomfortable.  As a result, I, for the most part, confine my visits to the summer and early fall.

I discovered this spot shortly after I ended my relationship with Eve.  In fact, it was the dissolution of us that led, no, forced me to find this place of solitude for contemplation; a sanctuary from the trials and travails of quotidian life.  Honestly, I did not know what to do; I was desperate for a solution to my dilemma, for what I needed; for a sanctuary.  Really, many of my impulses were crazy, the concoctions of a madman, or an animal wild beyond reason with desperation, frantic, frightened, loony.  I considered my closet.  Imagine, a closet in my own apartment.  I thought the local [deleted church] cemetery might be appropriate.  But I required a vast outdoor venue — open spaces, blue sky, fresh air.  Then the solution flashed before me one day as I perused the newspaper.  The simple daily paper is a treasure trove of information and a marvelous touchstone for great ideas.  Appearing that day, when I needed to see it the most, was an article about our city’s wonderful green jewel, the forest reserve encircling our city.

The very morning I read the piece, I phoned into work sick.  Certainly I was guilt ridden lying to my employer.  I am a loyal person.  I prize loyalty to me in people and my company.  It hurt me very much to lie.  However, the circumstance was exceptional and I knew without a doubt I had no choice.  The forest reserve was the godsend I was groping for and I could not let it slip from my grasp.  [Deleted One Saturday] I explored a half dozen forest reserve locations.  By the middle of the day, I found my spot, my place, my true home, my temple for contemplation; I found my sanctuary.  Never once, not even the occasional times when I have visited in the dark, have I seen The Pinstripes, or do I feel afflicted or sad.

In my sanctuary, I sit on the little mound overlooking the meadow and the stream.  Over time, several mounds have risen from the ground, small mounds, nearly imperceptible, really, invisible to anybody who might wander here, to anybody but me.  I cherish these eruptions in the flat ground.  They are special to me and I focus my attention on them.  I concentrate on each in turn, lingering on each for several minutes.  I study them, ruminate on them, mediate like a priest over communion.  They are much more than dirt piles to me.  To me, they are memories, the most pleasant memories.  In them I find I can relive fond moments of my life.  In them the reality of whatever badness there has been in true life vanishes.  What’s left is only the good.  These mounds represent goodness, the fine spirit of life that doesn’t seem possible in real life.  I know this may sound vague.  Think of it this way:  The mounds are like films in which only the best of a time, an incident, a person appear.  In life perfection is a desire, and maddeningly elusive.  But films, the nice films, can project complete goodness.  And it’s the same with my mounds:  They are the perfection unachievable in real life.  I can gaze upon these mounds for hours and never tire of absorbing the perfection I see in them as it plays and replays in my mind. 

I have two regrets:  I cannot visit my sanctuary as often as I’d like.  And there are never sufficient little mounds in my sanctuary.  However, as I’ve stated:  Perfection does not exist in real life.

 

CHAPTER 3:  SANCTUARY

My apartment and my employment aren’t my favorite places.  They are locations in my life.  I must live somewhere.  I must work somewhere.  Where I live and work is in the north; I can admit that much.  Winters are bleak and bitter here.  I need a warm place and so I have my apartment.  But I don’t occupy my apartment alone; I share it with The Pinstripes.  I sometimes wonder what the management would think if they knew literally thousands of men occupied my apartment with me! 

I like my apartment well enough.  But there is a place that I like much more.  If where I live now was warm year round, like Florida, I could take up residence in my favorite place throughout the year, if doing so didn’t give people the impression I was a strange person, or worse, a dangerous individual.  As it is, I can visit the spot only during the summer.  Sometimes I spend the night in my favorite place; but I don’t do this very often for the reason I mentioned.  In addition, to do so would require a lot of paraphernalia that I don’t own and don’t want to purchase.  I don’t really care to own more than I actually need.  Owning is a burden.  Additionally, when the time comes for me to move, it would mean transporting too many possessions; or, equally unappealing, disposing of them.  And if I am ever required to move quickly, doing so would be very difficult with a truckload of possessions.  I own some things, but I am fortunate in that I have no attachments to any of the stuff, except for the few precious items, which I store safely in a small suitcase I keep in my bedroom closet and in a box in my refrigerator.

My favorite place is several miles from my apartment.  Every once in a while, when I absolutely must I rent a car to visit it.  Most often, though, I simply take the public bus, which leaves me within easy walking distance.  I don’t mind walking in the pleasant summer weather and gladly would walk several miles.  As I mentioned, I set a premium on maintaining my physical fitness.

My favorite place has no name.  That is to say it has no formal name, which is fine with me, because, for reasons I don’t care to go into, I wouldn’t mention it here even if it had one.  It is best I keep my favorite place unnamed and secret.

My favorite place is in a forest.  In the forest is a meadow.  Running though the meadow is a stream.  I like to sit on the edge of the forest where it meets the meadow.  At this particular location, the steam squiggles by.  It is there at the edge of the forest, in the meadow, on the bank of the stream where I spend many weekends in the summer.  Truthfully, too, I am there occasionally on a weekday.  Its attraction for me is overpowering sometimes and I find myself playing hooky.  I don’t like to indulge myself too often as doing so burdens a co-worker with stocking the various kitchens.  I dislike being unkind to my co-workers, though they are not among my favorite people, as I’ve said.

On the days when I visit my favorite spot, I begin the day in my kitchen.  I enjoy my breakfast first, and then I pack a lunch for the day away.  Normally, I don’t eat lunch.  But these visits are the exception that make the rule, so to speak.  I enjoy hardly anything more than lying back, nibbling healthful tidbits, while I gaze out across my verdant heaven. 

I’m not a heavy eater, but I do enjoy an assortment of cut vegetables and fruits and plain grain bread.  I always fill the thermos with ice-cold skim milk.  The thermos is a good one, and my milk is as cold later when I drink it as when I first poured it.

I may not have mentioned this fact earlier, but I have a lunch pail.  I use it exclusively for my excursions into the country.  It is a very utilitarian lunch bucket, black, domed like a Dutch colonial house, containing my excellent thermos.  Actually, my lunch pail is a precious possession as it was my father’s.  Everyday, before he took the job away from us, he carried a lunch prepared by my mother.  I believe I can still smell his lunches, especially the fried egg sandwiches he loved.  My mother included a small packet of ketchup with the sandwich, and my father would apply it just before he ate; doing so ensured his sandwich wasn’t any soggier than necessary.  I admit that my memory and the physical evidence of its reality strongly suggests my father wasn’t an engineer; or perhaps engineers in his day behaved much like blue collar workers.  This aspect of my past confuses me, and often I promise myself I will investigate.  I would like my memory of my parents to be in precise order.

My lunch pail isn’t completely packed until I’ve opened the hatbox in my closet and the small box in the refrigerator, examined my most precious possessions, and selected at least one to include in my lunch pail with my lunch.

With all is in order, I plan my exit from my apartment and my building and my journey to the bus stop.  Perhaps my use of the word “plan” sounds odd.  When most people leave their homes or apartments, they probably stroll straight out the door without a concern. 

Unfortunately, I cannot be as carefree about leaving my abode.  I realize I have devoted much space to describing The Pinstripes and assuring you I see them only at night, only in the dark, and only in my bedroom.  I have not lied.  All the above are absolute truths.  But I never know.  I can never be sure The Pinstripes will confine their harassment of me to the dark in my bedroom.  I have to admit, as painful as the admission is, I suspect I have glimpsed a Pinstripe from time to time in the outside world on my way to my special place, to solitude and peace.  It’s as if the idea of my finding comfort offends them.  Yes, that’s the way it seems to me.

At my front door, I pause and listen.  I do not like to exit into the hallway unless it is empty.  I have lived here for several years and have managed through careful planning to avoid regular contact with my neighbors.  I do not dislike my neighbors; I simply do not wish to interact with them.  I’ve found that an occasional encounter can grow into more contact and more contact leads to the type of obligation I do not wish.  For instance, if I saw my neighbor a couple of times a week, I would have to acknowledge the person.  Eventually, we would exchange information; we would become acquainted.  Then the person would extend an invitation to stop by for coffee and conversation.  I am not a conversationalist.  No, I prefer my solitude and silence.

So, I listen.  If I hear nothing, I open my door and peer out.  I survey the corridor.  When I’ve satisfied myself the hallway is clear, I leave.

I live on the first floor.  I chose the first floor for a specific and logical reason:  First floor living allows me to enter and exit my apartment quickly without running into neighbors.  I also try always to leave at odd hours, further reducing the chance I will encounter someone.

Once on the street I feel safe, for on the street I can be anonymous.  People do not normally buttonhole you on the street, or attempt to establish a relationship with you.  The fact is, on the street, people work at avoiding you.  I am most comfortable in this environment.

The same is true of the bus stop.  You could see the same people every day at the bus stop and never have to speak to them and they will never speak to you and nobody will think this behavior peculiar.  On the contrary, chatting up a stranger at the bus stop would be extraordinary, viewed as threatening, an encroachment on highly cherished personal territory.  Nations have been known to war over intrusions like those that occur at a bus stop.

I have a strategy for my bus ride.  Whether I’m going to my favorite place or heading to work, I employ the same strategy.  Before leaving the house I gather up grocery bags I have saved.  I stuff several into one until it bulges.  On the bus, I find a seat.  Often, the bus is crowded and I have to share a seat, which I do not like to do.  I do not like an individual next to me.  But this is a city bus, so people are constantly getting on and off.  Eventually, whoever might be seated beside me leaves.  When I have the seat to myself, I scoot over to the window.  I place my bulging bag on the seat I’ve vacated, monopolizing it.  To ensure nobody comes along and asks me to move my bags so they might sit, I hum and grunt and sometimes for added insurance rock forwards and backwards.  Nobody wants to sit next to a crazy person — somebody who might be sick, who might act violently.  A person has to be desperate to summon the courage to ask the nut to make room to sit.  Of course, I’m perfectly normal, but I certainly wouldn’t want to reveal this to anybody on the bus; I cherish my solitude too much.

By car, the trip to my favorite place takes slightly more than a half hour.  However, via bus, I spend nearly an hour wending through city streets, stopping at virtually every corner, before arriving.  I have to weigh cost and speed versus savings and gained time.  I feel I must conserve my financial resources; consequently, the bus carries the day, and me. 

I am not a time waster by any means.  I read on the bus.  I enjoy popular magazines.  I especially enjoy reading about the antics of today’s personalities.  I think these people are totally divorced from reality.  They possess too much money and too much time.  Often, as I flip through the celebrity newspapers and magazines, the feeling they deserve a lesson in the life of an average person overwhelms me.  Other times I think they simply require to be remonstrated about their capricious lifestyles.  I suppose, if asked, I would volunteer to take this on.  Anyway, I occupy myself with a newspaper or magazine, and sometimes I leave the bus a bit emotional from these thoughts.

The bus stops directly outside the parking lot to the forest reserve in which is my favorite spot, the same lot in which I park the few days I drive.  Whichever conveyance I take, I arrive at the same place. 

From the bus stop or the lot, it is a trek to my favorite spot.  First, I walk down a path shared by joggers, walkers, and bicyclists.  I try to be in the reserve at times when people are at home.  I’ve measured the distance from the path entrance to the area where I diverge from the trodden way.  It is exactly six-thousand five-hundred and fifty-three feet.  I’m a snappy walker, so I can cover the distance in twelve minutes.  If I’m burdened, I require more time. 

At the six-thousand five-hundred and fifty-third footmark, I depart from the path and trek through the forest.  Where I live we have moderately tall trees, not nearly as tall as those growing on the coasts or in the Deep South.  Ours, however, are fine trees, a mix of deciduous and conifer.  I must tread through considerable undergrowth.  It isn’t always easy or pleasant, but when I have few items weighing me down it is not particularly onerous.  From the path to the edge of the forest, where the meadow commences and the stream winds by it is exactly one-thousand and thirty feet.  How do I know the precise distances?  After my first visit to the forest, when I’d selected my spot, I visited several more times with a pedometer hooked to the waistband of my kakis.  I used it a couple of times until I was certain of the distances.  I find accuracy is best as it eliminates uncertainty.  Uncertainty is a condition that creates anxiety in me, and I don’t like feeling anxious.  I have a hard time breathing when I am anxious. 

There is a small hill at the edge of the forest and it is on this hill that I usually sit.  From this vantage, I can gaze upon the meadow, the stream, and the forest.  In the summer, the landscape is wonderfully verdant.  I’ve visited in the early fall just as the leaves are changing; my spot is breathtaking then.  I’ve also visited in the spring when it is lovely pale green, fresh and new; but the weather can be terribly tricky in the springtime.  My hill can be wet.  Usually there is a chill in the air.  I find it uncomfortable.  As a result, I, for the most part, confine my visits to the summer and early fall.

I discovered this spot shortly after I ended my relationship with Eve.  In fact, it was the dissolution of us that led, no, forced me to find this place of solitude for contemplation; a sanctuary from the trials and travails of quotidian life.  Honestly, I did not know what to do; I was desperate for a solution to my dilemma, for what I needed; for a sanctuary.  Really, many of my impulses were crazy, the concoctions of a madman, or an animal wild beyond reason with desperation, frantic, frightened, loony.  I considered my closet.  Imagine, a closet in my own apartment.  I thought the local [deleted church] cemetery might be appropriate.  But I required a vast outdoor venue — open spaces, blue sky, fresh air.  Then the solution flashed before me one day as I perused the newspaper.  The simple daily paper is a treasure trove of information and a marvelous touchstone for great ideas.  Appearing that day, when I needed to see it the most, was an article about our city’s wonderful green jewel, the forest reserve encircling our city.

The very morning I read the piece, I phoned into work sick.  Certainly I was guilt ridden lying to my employer.  I am a loyal person.  I prize loyalty to me in people and my company.  It hurt me very much to lie.  However, the circumstance was exceptional and I knew without a doubt I had no choice.  The forest reserve was the godsend I was groping for and I could not let it slip from my grasp.  [Deleted One Saturday] I explored a half dozen forest reserve locations.  By the middle of the day, I found my spot, my place, my true home, my temple for contemplation; I found my sanctuary.  Never once, not even the occasional times when I have visited in the dark, have I seen The Pinstripes, or do I feel afflicted or sad.

In my sanctuary, I sit on the little mound overlooking the meadow and the stream.  Over time, several mounds have risen from the ground, small mounds, nearly imperceptible, really, invisible to anybody who might wander here, to anybody but me.  I cherish these eruptions in the flat ground.  They are special to me and I focus my attention on them.  I concentrate on each in turn, lingering on each for several minutes.  I study them, ruminate on them, mediate like a priest over communion.  They are much more than dirt piles to me.  To me, they are memories, the most pleasant memories.  In them I find I can relive fond moments of my life.  In them the reality of whatever badness there has been in true life vanishes.  What’s left is only the good.  These mounds represent goodness, the fine spirit of life that doesn’t seem possible in real life.  I know this may sound vague.  Think of it this way:  The mounds are like films in which only the best of a time, an incident, a person appear.  In life perfection is a desire, and maddeningly elusive.  But films, the nice films, can project complete goodness.  And it’s the same with my mounds:  They are the perfection unachievable in real life.  I can gaze upon these mounds for hours and never tire of absorbing the perfection I see in them as it plays and replays in my mind. 

I have two regrets:  I cannot visit my sanctuary as often as I’d like.  And there are never sufficient little mounds in my sanctuary.  However, as I’ve stated:  Perfection does not exist in real life.

 

CHAPTER 4:  HOME

My apartment is not my home; nor is home my sanctuary, though the sanctum is my favorite place.  They, the aforementioned living quarters of now and youth, may appear to be homes to me, especially my apartment, as it contains spaces normally associated with home — kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom.

My home is where I grew up.  It’s encompassing:  house, yard, street, and town.  And, of course, the people inside the house, the parents and the siblings.

Once I had a brother.  My employment of the past tense “had” may cause speculation that he died with my parents in the car accident; however, as my parents were returning from a party, you would not expect a child to be with them, especially when the parents had another child, almost as young, waiting at home.  A scenario of this sort would be incomprehensible.

I had a brother.  His name isn’t important, but I’ll call him Abel.  You would have liked Abel.  You would have loved the dear boy, as I myself loved my brother.  I’ve talked of the imperfection of life; yet, if perfection could exist in mortal life, Abel would have been it incarnate.

Abel was two years younger than I.  I am not the American image of a strapping young man, and neither was Abel.  He, in fact, was much smaller, not simply due to his younger age, but in absolute terms:  Abel was short, slim, aquiline of face, graceful in the limbs, fluid in motion; he was delicate, more feminine than masculine.  As an adult, he certainly would not have been a normal man, and would have been the brunt of cruel misunderstanding.  That he never made it to maturity was merciful; it was a kindness not often encountered in this world.

Abel was a boy with numerous talents.  Complementary to his gracefulness was his musical ability.  His voice was divinity in waveform:  He was a boy soprano who could effortlessly scale to the highest notes, and this without training of any sort.  Instruments enamored him, and when any were put before him, he would take to them and I would find him playing them with uncanny perfection within a few hours.  He did not read music; though I have no doubt he would have acquired the skill once in the fifth grade.  He possessed an ear.  He was like a prodigy who, upon hearing the notes, plays pieces perfectly.  This was his God’s gift. 

Our parents were good about having a prodigy in the family.  Abel’s musical talent emerged the moment he rose, tottered, and then uttered words.  He grouped those words into thoughts — not simply cute sentences but cogent ideas, fostering the impression he’d carefully formulated what issued from his cherub’s lips.  Unexpected, for sure, if you were not acquainted with Abel.  On the tray of his highchair while awaiting his mashed peas and carrots, he danced his tiny fingers.  My mother, who herself owned a wondrous musical ear, recognized his beat immediately as the melody of a song she had been listening to in the afternoon and humming along with as she cleaned the house and kept an eye on us.  There was the dear boy tapping the tune on his food tray.  But not just tapping, he was gliding his tiny fingers over the plastic as a pianist does over ivory.  Being a lady raised in a time when almost any girl from a family of any means did a stint on a parlor piano, my mother comprehended instantly what the rascal was up to.

Christmas arrived and under the bright tree was a miniature piano, perfectly sized for a runt of Abel’s diminutive stature.  He rewarded her for her astuteness by playing the tune that had attracted her and convinced her of his musical gift.  Mind you, he gave his performance a whole two months after revealing his ability.  My mother was ecstatic, and uncontrollably so; honestly, she irritated me and my father with her carrying on.  Was it worth it, we wondered? 

I will not belabor Abel’s musical acumen.  Suffice it to say he played piano, violin, and guitar, and, of course, he sang as if he had been in training for several years, though I can testify he never benefited from lessons, not even a voice coach.  Abel was truly blessed.

Here I must be honest:  I did not appreciate Abel’s talent.  I don’t mean I did not recognize his ability, because I did, and I admired it, and admired him for possessing it.  However, I was a child myself then.  I craved the attention of my parents, of my aunts and uncles, of our family friends.  Imagine my feelings when these various people visited us and clamored to hear our little Mozart play and sing.  He performed in our living room.  My mother turned over a portion of the room, a section of bare hardwood floor, to him.  This area was designated his stage.  There under the glare of a gooseneck lamp he performed, playing his miniature piano, stroking his tiny violin, singing incipient songs heard on the radio and memorized just from the hearing.  At the end, invariably, he earned the applause and praise of the congregated.  Always as part of the exultant clapping would be prognostications of greatness.  Abel would be a star; he would make a name for himself; he would win a place in history, an immortality denied to most people, me among them.  I did not react well to what happened to him.  Sadly, when I look back on the evening of Abel’s fatal accident, grief did not reduce me to a blubbering mess, as it did my mother. 

I viewed Abel’s death with utter, dispassionate honesty.  It was a stupid, absurd, quite unbelievable death for such a brilliant and promising boy.  Personally, at the time I could think only an imbecile would die in the manner Abel bungled for himself.  But, then, I suppose it is why we describe what happened to Abel as an accident.

We enjoyed the privilege of an expansive yard.  Even by today’s standard set by the suburban gentry, those living in abodes derisively but accurately labeled McMansions, it was large.  In it was a sandbox and a swing set. 

Though we were a bit big for the sandbox, or at least I was, we played in it often; I built cities and roads in the sand and pushed toy cars along the thoroughfares.  Abel joined in, or dug holes in his section of the box.  I did not like his ditch digging when I was imaging my cars streaming along downtown streets.  His kiddie excavations were like giant potholes, sand quarries serving no other purpose than to disrupt my play, to make conjuring my vision of cities and roads impossible.  Of course, he wasn’t much help when I persuaded him to stop digging and play city with me; he could not drive on the roads, and did not comprehend the importance of following the rules of my game.  He may have been a genius, but he lacked certain essential, practical knowledge … to the degree it drove me nutty.

We spent more time on the swing set.  I loved flying as high as I could, normally under my own stream; I was a powerful leg pumper.  If there existed a leg pumper competition, an Olympic event of sorts, I, without doubt, would finish among the top three, and possibly number one most of the time.  Yes, I could really pump my legs and achieve heights others, Abel especially, could merely gape at and never hope to rival.  Rarely did I ask for a push, but occasionally I was so weary I could barely gain a few feet of altitude.  In those instances — and trust me, they were few — I called upon Abel to shove me into the great blue beyond.  He obliged gratefully and enthusiastically, as he derived tremendous pleasure watching me ascend to heights he dared not dream of.

It happened that on the fateful day, the great weariness overcame me and I languished on the swing set.  Poor Abel watched me with pitiful sadness; he did love his older brother and wished him, that is me, to be happy all the time, as happy as he was.  To aid me, to restore me to good humors, to minister me back to halcyon spirits, dear Abel offered to push me into gleeful parabolic motion.  Oh, yes, he was an altruistic boy, another of his stellar qualities; but also he was selfish, like we all are, for launching me into the great blue sky would result in his personal satisfaction.  He did love to watch me fly, to stand in the breeze of my up and down motion, to stand there and dream of the day he would pump to the height of the bar.

Abel had pushed me before; this was not his first time.  He was an experienced pusher, and excellent too.  I remember him positioning himself behind me.  I can still feel his little hands, his fine slim hands, his musically gifted digits on my back giving me the first push.  I didn’t travel far, two feet perhaps, and returned slowing to where I had begun, to where he stood eager to speed me into a beautiful arc.  His hands caught me and pushed again, and this time I moved farther, maybe four or five feet.  But more important, in the instant of marking the new distance, I felt my usual strength surge through me, watched my legs rise up, and tingle with power, and I knew I could pump and pump and reach new heights that day. 

I returned to Abel on the end of a longer arc and though I couldn’t see him I knew my speed surprised him and caused him to falter.  I compensated, for it was not my wish or intention to injure my sweet brother, by pumping vigorously.  My idea was to leap forward, away from him, and therefore save him.  Unfortunately, it did not work out as I had hoped and my pump shoved me back into him, hard.  Worse, he had miscalculated my arc; though he had stepped back a bit, it proved to be insufficient.  I struck him in the upward trace of my backward arc, hit him square under his young and delicate chin.  The thump jarred me the way I imagine an auto striking a pedestrian would unsettle a driver.  To escape, to save him from additional horrible injury, I pumped hard, flew forward, and jumped from the swing.

The sight of Abel was disturbing.  The seat swung over him like a pendulum, back and forth in an ever-tightening tic tock of a winding down timepiece.  If it were I on the ground and halfway conscious, I would have, at the least, flinched at the passing of the swing seat.  As Abel moved not an iota, I knew instantly the situation was serious, perhaps irredeemable. 

His head laid at an odd angle, unnatural as they say, almost perpendicular to his shoulders.  Now I have slept in a similar position (this, of course, before The Pinstripes) and awoken with the most horrible crick in my neck.  It is quite comical the way I maneuvered with my head cocked.  I certainly smiled at myself when I caught my image in the hall mirror.

Abel, however, was not in humorous circumstances.  He was injured frightfully; he was dead.  I had seen death before, so I did not have to stand over him or touch him or smell him to know he was dead.  But I did perform each validation just enumerated, as a person cannot be too sure in the matter of death, especially the demise of a dear brother.  I knelt beside my darling brother, the boy once brimming with promise, the tiny prodigy, the genius, the most loved and adored creature, the apple of many eyes, of my parents’ dazed orbs.  Oh, yes, he was dead; there was no doubt.  I knew death.  Not human death, but that of little animals.  I’d held small, fuzzy creatures and had their limp heads hang from loose necks over the edge of my palm.  In fact, I tenderly lifted Abel’s head, a head capped with fine hair, skin flawless, still warm, yet redolent, and kissed his pristine forehead.  I inhaled the fleeing molecules of his short life, his potential.  Then I set his head on the ground straight as an arrow, in perfect alignment with his body, as if he were a beautiful boy in the midst of a delightful, refreshing, peaceful slumber.

Abel’s prostrate, motionless body frightened me.  Accidents are dreadful affairs and never should occur.  Once I was in an emergency room, many years after Abel’s passing, for a silly affliction, but sufficiently serious to send me in search of medical attention.  I had cut myself.  I sometimes cut myself as I can be quite careless in the use of knives.  I can slice a carrot and discover myself slicing my fingers.  I was in the emergency room as a result of this neglectful behavior.  As the doctor tended me, he engaged me in idle conversation.  I can’t say it was much of a conversation as I admit oral exchanges are not my forte.  But I listened and I remembered, and what I remember is this:  The doctor who repaired battered and damaged people every day, every hour, every minute, stated:  “There are no accidents.”  It was his contention people hurt themselves purposely.  His statement impressed me, for I believe, and still do, as he did.  Nothing occurs without a reason, and events involving people are caused by those people.

Well, you can imagine my feelings as I stood over the lifeless body of my poor little brother.  He was dead because I had struck him on my back swing.  I wondered if it had been my intention to strike him.  I admit to suffering a case of sibling resentment.  After all, Abel was the embodiment of perfection, and I was the opposite:  quite imperfect.  Perhaps I did arc back with the idea of inflicting a bit of pain, of providing him with a sense of what it was like to be me, for I had lived a painful life in his tiny shadow.  I stood over his body, guilty, and fearful.  For in the dawning moments of his death, I was afraid to be the messenger of his untimely demise as my parents might conclude I was the cause.

Happily I can report my fear was groundless, as I would have known had I been reasoning clearly at the time.  But the death of the dear little one was overwhelming, blinding me to the soothing, considerate, understanding, loving, and readily accepting nature of my parents.  Oh, the death of Abel, the suddenness, the cruelty, the vicissitude of God and nature, and the knowledge that their oldest, a boy of tender sensibility, a true lover of his young sibling, an admirer and worshiper of his gifts and skills had witnessed the horror — well, it was simply too much for them.  Honestly, we barely got Abel embalmed, transported to the church, and in the ground.  I am not overstating matters one iota by stating that:  Burying him was a miracle!  My mother nearly climbed onboard the lid of his coffin and rode it into the grave with him.  What an unsightly commotion, like an unpaid trollop dragging at the heels of her john begging for payment or love or whatever!  However, once my father and the funeral director restored ordered, we, as a sorrowful, loving, and reunited family, accomplished our mission of wishing dear Abel well in the next life in a decorous manner. 

Afterwards, as in the moment the last clump of dirt rolled off Abel’s burial mound, we went on vacation, to an area with hills and a lovely lake, and my father and I tried our hands at fishing (mixed results, I’m afraid), and we hiked until at night our eyes could be kept open by nothing, not even the memory of dear Abel.  A week later we returned home refreshed, again prepared to tackle the mundane affairs of life. 

This is not to say we forgot Abel.  Not at all.  We established a wondrous family tradition (though I sadly report it vanished with my parents).  Each Sunday after mass we trooped in line through the graveyard to the boy’s memorial.  My mother refreshed the flowers.  My father weeded the ground surrounding the gravestone.  I surveyed the graveyard and marveled over how many people had given up the ghost.  I puzzled over how many of them were happy to shuffle off the coil of life, to don the cloak of eternity.  When finished, tradition required we go into town, stop at our favorite breakfast restaurant, and order up and consume a huge, scrumptious meal.  Or at least I did.  My parents, in retrospect, did not own healthy morning appetites. 

As you can see, great sadness marred the otherwise happy and lovely lives of my parents.  Abel’s death was difficult for them and I have to report the two were never quite the same, with each other, or with me. 

They seemed cool to each other, which is not to imply in any way that they were previously a passionate couple.  They were a polite pair.  They wished each other good morning.  They sent each other off with good tidings for the day.  They pecked at each other’s cheeks upon departing and returning.  Occasionally, as if this was important to my emotional growth, they embraced and made a show of caring for each other.  I suppose you can say they were a typical married pair.  Of course, this was before my father decamped for weeks and months on end, reappearing whenever he required my mother.

These outward displays of caring did not cease after Abel left our family.  They treated each other the same as far as I could detect.  No, the change came in how they handled me.  Sorrowfully, because it is never nice to speak ill of your parents, especially parents no longer with you, I have to tell you mine were not very supportive of me when Abel lived; however, at least my mother spoke to me, reviewed my school report card, teased me with tidbits of encouragement, avowed her love of me from time to time.  After Abel departed, these small and limited parental buck ups dwindled, became less heartfelt and less meaningful to me.  It was as if my parents harbored a secret, and it involved me.

As a result, I found dealing with them awkward.  They would not express their inner feelings about me to me; and I could not bring myself to articulate for them their misgivings toward me.  Living with them (mostly my mother), and I had no choice but to domicile myself in the family manse, was like taking a room in those ice hotels you see featured in magazines and on television around the holiday season.  Hell is supposed to be a hot place.  Believers should have called on my family for stark disabusing of that notion.  Hell was an icebox. 

However, I was always a good son.  I was the best son parents could ever wish for.  I frequently prepared meals for my parents, although she, and he, chose not to consume my concoctions.  I attributed their refusal to the fact that I prepared kid meals — macaroni and cheese, hotdogs, and the like.  Looking back, I can’t blame them, as I eat none of that poison today.

Early on I crept to their room when they were together to kiss each and wish each the most restful slumber.  I kissed their cheeks.  I serenaded them with sweet boy lullabies.  Shortly, they closed their bedroom door, a new practice.  I opened it and carried on with my caring behavior.  They locked the door.  I retreated to my bedroom, hurt that my parents rejected me in such a deliberately heartless manner.

Earlier, perhaps I gave the impression I was heartsick over their deaths by automobile? 

I don’t believe I ever was.

 

CHAPTER 5:  WORSHIP

I derive wonderful solace and peace from my sanctuary.  Some people find similar comfort in their churches.  I understand how they might; I don’t share their feeling but do understand it, as my mother adored church.  I sometimes think she loved church more than she did my father, or me (though, of course, not Abel, never Abel).  Perhaps my dislike of church stems from this:  that in her universe it ranked above me.  But even in matters of God and eternity, nothing could outshine Abel in her eyes.

To please my mother, I spent a good deal of time in church.  Our family was Catholic and my mother was a vigorous practitioner.  In my early years, I attended mass every week, and sometimes more as she enrolled me in various church activities, including a long, agonizing stint of religious indoctrination and duty as a member of the church’s youth choir.  I admit I enjoyed the latter, and discovered I owned a pleasant singing voice.  Still today I take pleasure humming a tune from time to time.  I especially like humming when I am engaged in a task requiring concentration.  I find humming and singing, even if only in my head, helps me focus on whatever task may be at hand.

My parents enrolled me in a Catholic grammar school.  Every Sunday my schoolmates and I would appear at mass under the direction of the nuns who taught us.  Classes sat together as groups with their teachers.  The nuns strictly enforced their rules.  They demanded we sit properly, which meant backs straight and hands with palms down on the tops of our thighs.  We knelt with ramrod backs, too, and slouching or resting your rear on the edge of the pew was forbidden.  Succumbing to restful temptation would earn you a cuff on the ear.  The nuns did not shy from roughly enforcing their rules in public and directly under the eyes of the God they served, in His own house.  You’d hope parents would object to nuns smacking their children, but parents in those times appreciated the discipline instilled by others.

Church attendance can be habit forming for some.  I, however, was among the alienated.  I vowed to myself to never set foot in a church, Catholic or otherwise, after my parents met their untimely and ridiculous fate.  And during the first semester away at college (the name and location of which I’d rather not reveal, though it was several hours drive from my home), I held to my pledge.

But I was lonely.  It wasn’t that I missed my parents.  I don’t believe, when I dig to the pit of my soul, I missed them much; possibly I didn’t miss them not even a little.  After all, they’d been gone for some years by then.  I was simply empty, and longing, longing.  I did not understand what was depressing me — until one cold Sunday between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I discovered myself strolling past the college gates into the surrounding neighborhood.

It was a pleasant place, that neighborhood, similar to my own.  The houses were nice.  They were large enough for a good size family, as we’d been years before, but not ostentatious.  Not huge monstrosities, symbols of success, intimidators of the failed.  It was dusk when I made my first visit.  People had switched on their lights, and houses released soft incandescent rays through windows, over frozen lawns, at me.  I ached for a family.

I walked two blocks.  At the corner, I encountered a church, not Catholic but Protestant.  Like the houses on the streets radiating from it, this edifice was lit, and beamed me a soft, golden invitation to enter, to participate in the services of the church and the life of the neighborhood.  I accepted gladly, and the next week I attended my first worship service.

The church’s exterior was of colossal rough-hewed stone, each slab detached from the earth by hands of quarrymen and chiseled by artisans.  The windows were stained glass; panes of colored glass clean of iconography.  The interior was plain, the walls white, the ceiling white and vaulted, the chancel simple, furnished with an organ and a few pews for a choir.  Lamps fitted with golden glass hung from the ceiling and ran along the sides near the walls.  They bathed the interior in the same golden light that spilled outside and which had beckoned me in.  It was a wonderful place of escape.  A place to sit and ponder.

Protestant churches, however, and all derivative sects for that matter, leave something to be desired in the panoply department.  It’s a direct result of rejecting all things Catholic, first among them saints.  Personally, I have always enjoyed the saint aspect of Catholicism.  It is reassuring to know you can benefit from a patron, someone who has led an exemplary existence and who is now paving the way for the likes of us as we engage in their favorite enterprises.

As a boy growing up Catholic, I owned a hagiography, and found myself wiling away hours building my saint expertise.  Many of the saints were quite bizarre.  St. Catherine is a prime example, a woman who was claimed to have not had a bowel movement for years.  Some were exquisite, especially at their deaths.  The saint who pulled me to his story time and again was Sebastian.  And what I found so irresistible was the illustration of him and his martyrdom. 

There Sebastian stood in full color loosely suspended from a stake, naked but for a modesty cloth draping from his waist.  His persecutors were out of the picture, though there was no doubt they stood out of the frame with the same perspective as anyone looking on.  The implication, of course, was that we all are participants.  They martyred him by shooting him full of arrows.  The picture illustrated a half dozen protruding from his torso.  This wasn’t gruesome as the arrow shafts stuck out of bloodless rents, and he had cast his eyes above into the ethers.  His face radiated peace and was not grimaced with the agony you’d expect in such a situation.  Over his head hovered a precious nimbus.

Relics went hand and hand with saints.  I realize to the uninitiated relics and reliquaries sound abominable.  However, I found this aspect of Catholicism wondrous.  Imagine, owning forever a part of someone you admire, or love, or even despise, possessing a portion of anyone for whom you are passionate?  At any time you desired, anywhere, too, if the size is compact, as most are, you could relive your relationship. 

In the church, I meditated on the concept.  It seemed reasonable to me, ancient and widely and historically acceptable.  You only have to recall our own Native Americans who took the scalps of their conquests, or the African tribes that shrunk the heads of their adversaries.  In my own small way, I admit, I’d become a keeper of relics years earlier, when I surreptitiously clipped a bit of dear dead Abel’s hair.  I placed his beloved locks in a black sateen cufflink box, and I have the Abel relic to this day still, safely secreted in my closet.

The Sunday service in this solid stone church was straightforward and not overly long, consisting of singing, some praying, a sermon (occasionally interesting), and more singing.  But what I liked most were the people who populated the pews.  I sat in the rear to better observe the congregation.

While missing saints and iconography, the church was strong on families.  These weren’t large families, but families like my own would have been had Abel survived, had my parents foresworn a party and had not encountered a pickup; that is, mother, father, two children.  The families dressed appropriately for church and more formally than people do now for most any event.  Many men wore sports jackets and ties; woman wore dresses or nice skirts and blouses.  Boys were in pressed shirts and dress slacks and girls outfitted themselves like miniatures of their mothers, or else frilly birthday cakes.  Generally, it was a handsome congregation.

I enjoyed the women, especially those who attended in suits.  Of course, the suits fit snuggly, an appealing fact in itself.  Also, the women in them projected a strong sense of formality, and this was more alluring than the fit of their clothing.  In the several Sundays I attended, I ranged over the church, sitting behind different families, until I found a woman who was too irresistible.  I chose to sit behind her permanently.  Her hair was short and blond.  She wasn’t slim by today’s standard, but not heavy either, not zaftig.  She was proportioned like a woman should be, at least in my opinion:  She was curvy. 

She — Ruth, my name for her — Ruth was a suit lady.  She wore suits professionally for she was the neighborhood Avon Lady, as I learned when I overheard a conversation one Sunday on the church steps after services.  Ruth alternated two suits on Sundays, both of which enamored me enormously.  I noticed her for the first time in her light gray suit.  The gray was pale and flecked with intermittent crosshatchings of a darker gray.  Her jacket was cut short, finishing above her waist, the hem resting on the tips of her hips and above the flare of her buttocks.  The skirt was what they called cigarette style; it was very tight and descended to just below her knees.  She wore stockings, as any decent woman does, and black pumps with modest heels.  The other suit was navy blue.  Its jacket finished just over her hips, but was nipped at the waist, revealing and emphasizing her appealing silhouette.  The skirt was the same length as the other, but several inches of the lower portion between her legs front and back was pleated.  As with the gray suit, she wore stockings and black heeled pumps.  Underneath the jackets of both outfits was a simple white blouse open at the throat, revealing a modest gold necklace suspended from which was an almost childishly small gold locket.  The contents of the locket aroused my curiosity. 

She attended church with her husband and two children.  The children were girls who appeared to me to be around eleven and twelve.  I’ve always had a good sense of children’s ages, as Abel’s and my own age at the time of his death are indelibly engraved in my memory.  They were attractive girls, lanky, blond, and always well turned out in frilly dresses. 

Her husband was a tall man, a half a head taller than me.  He had sandy hair and was slim but thick where it mattered, in the chest and arms.  He favored sport coats for church.  He struck me as a fellow who could do considerable harm if provoked.  I promised myself not to do anything to anger him.

All in all, they were a very pleasing and handsome family.  A family to admire, and to envy, for who could conceive of such perfection, especially someone such as me whose experience was a broken — broken what?  Broken assemblage of people, two old, two young.  This family was an achievement, and who could resist its charm?  Not I, who succumbed instantly.

Now, over the several weeks I attended services at the church, I discovered myself drawn to the woman’s locket, which I glimpsed whenever she turned to quiet her daughters, or when she exited down the aisle with her family.  It was small, a golden heart.  It caught and reflected the divine light of the church, sparkled gaily in the lovely hollow of her neck, fit so snuggly and hypnotically in the tanned and tempting recess.

I fixated on the locket and wondered what might be inside the precious heart.  Was it a tiny, dear photo of the daughters, their heads pushed together, bright smiles on their faces?  Was it a photo of her husband, perhaps a gift bestowed by him during the time they dated?  Or, maybe, it was a photo of the entire family?  Needing to know began to obsess me.

The compulsion inspired me to learn where she lived.  I began my quest by following the family from church to their car.  They drove a new car, as I expected they would from their prosperous attire and refined comportment.  They exuded affluence, and I suspected she was an excellent Avon Lady.  She certainly projected the image of someone any woman would love to emulate.

As they drove to and from church, it required a couple of weeks before I found their home.  I took to leaving services earlier and earlier in order to hurry to the last place I had watched them pass in their car.  Admittedly, it was a clumsy and time-consuming exercise.  Nonetheless, it worked. 

I had no doubt they lived in an adorable house, one probably the envy of their neighbors.  I know I was envious the moment I observed their shiny car ease into the driveway.  Oh, what a gem it was.  A white colonial, large, rambling you might say, adorned with tasteful black shutters and an imposing black highly lacquered front door projecting an air of impenetrability.  I may be a bit prejudiced, but I considered her house the jewel of the street.  Since it was a late Sunday morning, I decided to return another day, just to observe.

I couldn’t hold off but a day.  I found myself on their street that Tuesday, mid morning.  I strolled the street from corner to corner, always with an eye on their home.  I’m not a sartorial wizard, as I have already related, but I do appreciate a handsome and highly functional watch.  I had then the Vajoux 7730 chronograph, and wore it as I walked Ruth’s street.  Thus, I am one-hundred percent certain I paced for fifty-three minutes.  At the first tick of the fifty-fourth, Ruth opened the garage door from inside and appeared, as if setting foot on a stage for the start of a much anticipated performance.  She had a level of stunning, breathtaking, paralyzing beauty I had never considered simply because such heights would be impossible for mortal woman.  (Eve also was mistress of the same overpowering attractiveness, but it was of a different, darker variety.)  There it was: female perfection.  There she was.  Perfect.  I required every reserve of restraint I possessed to maintain my safe zone.

As she turned into the garage, I angled closer, mustering a casual attitude, which, when I think about it, probably lent a robotic, and suspect, quality to my movements.  I don’t consider myself much of an actor and certainly admire those who have honed this wonderfully useful skill.  Fortunately, there was no one about, but us. 

I got close enough to observe her climbing into her car.  She was wearing a dazzling white suit.  The very tight skirt forced her to settle on the seat facing outward, providing me with a delirious view of her legs, very long and lean, nylon sheathed, glistening provocatively, issuing waves of temptation my way.  Waves that struck me, rippled through me and rendered me a little irrational.  She wore her black pumps, which I adored.  She swung her legs neatly into the car and closed the door, and I released my breath in a pant and drew in air rapidly, realizing I had not drawn breath while she had been maneuvering into her car.  She was dressed for her day of peddling Avon products.

Since a second car, the sandy-haired husband’s that I would follow after church, was nowhere to be seen, and it was midday on a Tuesday morning, I concluded the house was empty.  In a flash, I concocted my plan to enter and have a look around.  I did not show up at her house that morning with an intention of going inside.  My hope was to see her on a typical day to better know her, to foster my imaginings of what her life was like, and what life could be with her.  But, I could not resist.

People are peculiar creatures.  On the issue of crime, for instance, they complain vociferously about the level of it and the failure of authorities to protect the taxpaying public from it.  Then they contradict themselves and place themselves and their loved ones in danger by not securing their own homes.  Today, such oxymoronic behavior is inexcusable.  However, in the year I am describing, I believe less crime existed and there was less to worry about and in a quiet college town, especially, there was no reason to have the mind to adopt the habits of a security specialist. 

I was grateful Ruth had not locked the backdoor, perhaps to allow her daughters easy access after school.  Whatever the reason, I was happy I could enter Ruth’s home without breaking a window or otherwise damaging her property.  After all, I held Ruth in the highest regard and wished no harm to her or her possessions.

Ruth’s home was as I imagined from outside.  In a word:  Lovely.  She enjoyed a spacious kitchen.  It was entirely white, except for the floor, which was a practical, and very clean, deep gray tile.  A counter separated the kitchen and the dining room, and served double-duty as a convenient place to snack.  Four wooden stools with spindle backs were tucked under the slight cantilever of the countertop.  I remember thinking, here was a very smart use of space. 

The dining room was neat as a pin.  A large breakfront protected Ruth’s finest dishes and glasses, every item artfully posed.  The table, a highly polished walnut, sat six, and I suspected it expanded to accommodate at least eight, perhaps more.

To be honest, I could carry on about the house forever, but then I would be like the friends who bore you with their vacation pictures.  Let me say each room was as clean, ordered, and utterly delightful.

I noticed it first on the ground floor and as I proceeded up the stairs, lovely carpeted risers that curved slightly and that she had lined with engaging floral art.  It was an aroma.  It was the scent she must have been wearing when she left.  It was floral, a mild frangipani, but young, exuberant, new like the sweet smell of emerging spring.  It grew stronger and stronger as I neared her bedroom, the room she shared with the sandy-haired husband.  In her bedroom it almost overpowered me, not because it was suffocating in its abundance, which it was not, but because it was as if she were entering me, possessing me.  It was as if the essence of her being commingled with my own.  I staggered for a moment and settled on the edge of her queen-size bed, not to recover, for who would wish to expel her and the marvelous sensation of possession?  I sat in order to breathe her in, to intensify our connection, to hold her to me and in me in the only way I could at that moment.  Turning, I cast my eyes over the bed and lingered on it, wondering which side was hers, allowing myself to imagine what transpired there, feeling my cheeks heat up, embarrassed about my thoughts, the pictures in my mind of her and the sandy-haired husband, of me in his place, and about the tumescence in my lap.  Then I knew I had to know which side was hers.

I could not bring myself to rise from the bed, not wishing to break my link with her.  I slid up the bed — careful not to muss it too badly — up to the pillow.  I bent to bury my face in the pillow and was overjoyed to discover I was on her side.  The smell of her was most penetrating here and I succumbed to a blissful release.

I lingered for a while, but no more than a minute; after all, it wasn’t in my plan to overstay.  I rose and walked to the closet that spanned the entire length of a wall.  I opened the left side.  It was his.  I closed it and opened the right.  It was hers, and it was magnificent.  It held her marvelous suits:  the light gray and blue, plus others I had not seen on her in church — pearl and yellow, and dresses, which I could only imagine her in.  Of particular interest to me and a garment I touched and smelled and brushed against my cheek and removed from the closet and held up to better envision her wearing it, a charming sun dress that would suspend from her shoulders by spaghetti straps and drop to just above her knees, revealing her lovely calves and perfect feet, perfect feet I’d seen only encased in formal pumps but which I knew could not be any less than absolutely impeccable.

After neatening the closet, I turned to her dresser that I assumed, correctly, was the low, long, highly decorated box.  I admit I hesitated at this point, for I knew — and quivered at the knowledge of — what I would find in the drawers.  I asked myself if this was too much; if by peering into these drawers and handling their contents I was invading Ruth’s truly private world.  But I was possessed, you see, stripped of all free will in the matter.  I pulled the top left drawer, then each drawer in succession, until in the end all the drawers stood open before me in a staged pattern that allowed me to view in a glance what each contained.  Oh, Ruth was a woman among women, a veritable queen, the master of what I admired, what every single female on the planet should bring to their marriage:  order, absolute, grand, and sufficient to wring tears from the eyes of the most tyrannical majordomo.

She kept her under things in two drawers, underpants in the upper drawer and bras in the lower, backward for my taste; however, I am not one to dictate how others should live their lives.  She arranged both by color, from light to dark.  Her underpants were light tones, white, pale blue, beige, plus red and black.  Her bras were brighter after the requisite neutrals:  pink, an electric blue, and red.  I lingered here, wondering what she was wearing under the white suit.  I couldn’t imagine anything but white or black; Ruth was too tasteful for anything but neutral colors when wearing a formal suit. 

I must have been quite preoccupied.  You know how it is:  You concentrate with such intensity the world dissolves around you, until it is just you and your thoughts.  I must have been in this state; otherwise I would have heard the footfalls on the steps, carpeted though they were, soft and delicate as they were.  Had my nose been functioning properly I would have caught the strengthening of the frangipani.  But, unfortunately, my nose was buried in a blue panty hunting for Ruth’s true scent, which I hoped, in vain, might have survived the wash, a chore at which she proved sadly skillful.

Ruth owned a lilting voice, sweet, pitched alto, melodic, a breath of spice, delicious to hear and taste, yet capable of roaring, as in the shock that poured forth when she encountered me in her bedroom, in her drawers in the fullest sense of the phrase.  I remember clearly what I did and said in my surprise.  I gently laid her garments in their proper drawers, in the exact positions from which I had removed them, neat as a pin, too.  I turned slowly to take her in:  tall, a white statue in a white suit that I noticed up close was subtly striped with a contrasting white, and I said very calmly, almost as if I was the sandy-haired husband who had seen her off for an eight-hour stint on the Avon circuit:  “I thought you were at work.”

As I certainly have mentioned, I am not a person who enjoys or tolerates raucous confrontation.  Yes, I adored Ruth, the embodiment of everything I desired in a woman; however, I could not have her screaming at me and attracting the attention of … well, I was in no mood to find out who might be about in the middle of a weekday morning.  I assure you I was very gentle with her, as I understood her concern.  Finding a stranger in your bedroom isn’t pleasant.  I also know women have special concerns in situations like these.  I attempted to convince her I was a kind soul and was there from adoration, that I came with no motives other than to learn more about the goddess I worshipped.  I used that exact word, too:  Goddess.  I called her Goddess, My Goddess.  “You are my Goddess and I worship you,” I repeated over and over again.

Truly, these proved themselves magic words, for she stopped yelling, locked onto my eyes — oh, I am embarrassed to admit I was mooning like a teenage boy at the time — and stared, as if she might read through to the reason I was in her under things drawer. 

I certainly would have dropped to my knee, supplicating myself to her beauty.  The situation, however, would not permit such adoring prostration, and instead I enwrapped her in my arms and clamped a hand over her mouth — I had maneuvered behind her.  She struggled and for fear of mussing her lovely white suit and perhaps injuring her I walked her over to the drapes, momentarily freed a hand, and yanked the cord very hard, as I believed I had only one chance.  I bound her arms behind her back, not without some effort, I should add, and laid her on her side of the bed.  I cautioned her to be quiet, otherwise I would have to gag her, and I did not wish to subject her to such treatment.  And I asked her not to cry; it was not my intention to make her cry.  Actually, I explained, it was not my intention to be found in the bedroom, and I would not have been had she carried on as I assumed she usually did.  I asked, with a bit of consternation (I was entitled, I believe, foiled as I was) why she had returned.  She replied she had forgotten her supply of brochures on a men’s aftershave Avon was introducing. 

I asked where they might be.  She appeared surprised by my question, and then eagerly told me.  I’ve always wondered if in that instant she thought she might have a customer for the new aftershave.  I retrieved the brochures from the top of the dresser, where she had placed them so as not to forget them and where I had completely overlooked them, and I studied the new product.  I told her she would do well with the aftershave because Avon had packaged it in a cute antique auto bottle.  Men, I reasoned, loved anything to do with autos, though, of course, this was not true of me.  I was the exception proving the rule.

I believed I was exhibiting a good deal of insight and, thus, was disappointed that she did not recognize my innate ability to understand and relate the merits of a product she sold.  Perhaps, I worried, I had been wrong about Ruth.  She was gorgeous and tempting, but she may have lacked the intellectual prowess I required of my women friends.  I was, after all, a college man and moved by intellectual, as well as physical, beauty.

However, with Ruth laid on the bed and the morning quickly running to noon, it wasn’t the time for metaphysical musing on my part.  Besides, I think my mental gymnastics were making her uneasy as my dialogue was entirely inner.  Honestly, I must have appeared as a standing catatonic to her.  I can’t say how long I debated with myself over her worthiness as a female friend, but knowing me I suspect I used up considerable time engaged in internal disputation. 

Politely, I apologized for neglecting her.  I enquired as to her comfort.  Unfortunately, she related her position was uncomfortable, lying on bound arms as she was.  I assured her the discomfort would vanish shortly.  First, though, I asked what was her favorite suit.  She didn’t answer me for a while, possibly because no one, not even her sandy-haired husband, had ever inquired about her sartorial favorites.  I urged an answer from her and I was thrilled when she revealed the light gray suit as the apparel she’d most wished to have with her if ever stranded on an island.  I immediately went to her closet and removed it.  I admitted I had seen her in this and another of her suits at church and I too ranked the light gray as best.  I returned the skirt to her closet, keeping the jacket for myself.  Naturally, I asked her permission to keep it.  She energetically nodded her consent, nearly pleading with me to take it.  I thanked her.  I hoped I wasn’t gushing, but modulating down the excitement whipping through me.

Then I asked her if she minded showing me her gold locket.  I admired it as art, as precious, as an item I could understand she would never wish to part with.  I assured her I would return it to her.  I told her I could easily relate to her attachment, for I too possessed precious items that if anybody took from me would leave me mortally wounded.  Really, you could shoot me, and stomp me, and the pain I would suffer would not amount to a tenth of losing my precious relics, I professed.  I could see the concern on her face for me.  I reached my hand forward and removed the locket from her neck with a sharp, and I prayed, painless yank.

I smiled at her and stepped back.  I opened the locket and studied the photos it held.  They were infant pictures of the two daughters, one on either side of the most delicate hinge I’d ever beheld.  I closed the locket and grasped it in my fist and I struck my fist against my heart and I muttered joyfully.  And then inspired by the miniature temple I clutched I began to hum a hymn I heard the congregation sing, and she too with wonderful enthusiasm.  I slipped the locket in my pants pocket for safekeeping.  I bent over her, descended close to her lovely face, breathed in her scent so strong on her heated body, and wrapped my trembling hands around her soft, smooth neck, gently placing my thumbs in the hollow, the home of the precious locket.  I sang “O paradise!  O paradise!  Who doth not crave for rest?”  I closed my eyes, the beauty of the song, of her, of the moment too much to bear, and I squeezed and squeezed, and by the time I finished, I was at, “All rapture through and through …”

Well, there’s little need to tell the rest of this tale.  Suffice to say, I retired from her bedroom with dear Ruth resting peacefully and beautifully attired on her bed.  I carefully folded the jacket into a neat, almost inconspicuous bundle.  I removed the locket from my pants pocket and placed it in the hollow of her neck.  Though I wished to keep it, I knew her hollow was its home and desired not to offend by separating it from her.  Her jacket was sufficient.  I let myself out of the house the way I had entered, leaving the door unlocked, as I knew this would have been her wish.  I strolled casually back to the campus and my dormitory room.  I have Ruth’s jacket to this day.  I worship it as I had worshiped her.

 

CHAPTER 6:  THE CRIPPLE

Earlier in my life I was not the private individual I am today.  Those were the days preceding the appearance of the first Pinstripe and the following army of suit-clad assaulters who continue to accumulate in and beyond my bedroom every night.  In those early days, the years following my graduation from college, I lived in a different city, one not too far from school and the church and my dear Ruth.  I lived and worked in the city and commuted to my job — a fine job in an office.  A job with responsibility, challenging tasks, travel, a modest expense account, everything a young college graduate could desire.  During my commute I encountered many different people, and occasionally someone would impress me.  The Cripple was such a person, though he depressed me.

The Cripple lived on a Rascal, those annoying scooters that endow the infirmed with mobility and the wherewithal to intimidate pedestrians and inconvenience normal people.  The Cripple had once been a big man, evidenced by his bulk and still-broad shoulders, the type of shoulders I’ve always admired and wished I possessed.  When he crossed my path, however, whatever muscle he’d had, had wasted, and though he was seated whenever I saw him I could easily see that his chest had dropped into his belly, and his belly rested in his lap.  He looked unkempt, as if running a comb through his hair or dragging a razor across his cheeks was on par with cleaning the Aegean Stables.  His eyes drooped, giving the impression he’d either just awoken or was drifting into sleep momentarily.  And while speaking of his head, he could not anchor it in one place for more than a few seconds; his palsy lobbed it here and there continuously, and I often found myself wondering how he kept from getting dizzy, before reminding myself it didn’t matter in the least as he was rooted on his Rascal.

As for the rest of his body, it was as quiescent as his head was active.  He never moved an atrophied muscle below his chest the entire time I knew him.  So worthless was his lower self, and his feet in particular, he did not bother with the expense or discomfort of shoes, which was, at least, a smidgen of a blessing.  Finding properly fitting shoes has always been a bane of mine.  I wear topsiders because they fit reasonably well and I can slip them off and on easily.

It certainly would be no surprise to find The Cripple a silent fellow, a reticent type, incapable of or disinclined to flap his jaws; however, he was anything but.  True, he couldn’t much move his lips, could hardly project his voice, could barely force words out of his mouth; and yet he insisted on chattering nonstop with everybody who came within his vicinity.  Any topic was game for his half-paralytic prattling, his spittle spewing, his crippled carping.  Politics, local and national; children and their discipline; men and their romantic treachery; pets and their adorable devotion.  On and on went his nonsense until no one near him could bear him any longer; though the problem was that nobody could bring themselves to demand he leave them alone.

One day, with my besieged brain dendrites shredded and screaming, I decided to step forward and put an end to The Cripple’s Joycean stream.  But, alas, I was halted in my effort and reduced to sitting as yet another acolyte to his yapping.  I offer only that he was a powerful personality, evidenced by his expensive suits, blue and gray pinstripes, marking him as a lawyer; his gold encrusted wristwatch horrifically beyond the pale of decency; his handmade shirts (one probably worth more than my entire closet of Henleys and kakis), and his socks, usually thick, thirsty black terry. 

Confrontation did not work against The Cripple’s shrewd mind.  His dynamo personality constantly generated new charms, attracting and holding many of the women in the car in orbit around him, though I believe he must have been a completely ineffectual male in the sexual department.  And that was the crux of the phenomenon:  He was a non-threatening, partial man where it counted most for these women.  I needed subterfuge and, thus, I launched my campaign to disguise myself as yet another of his sycophants. 

My first act was to change my seat in the train car.  This was a significance and challenging action on my part.  On a typical day in a typical train coach you see the same people.  What’s more, these people sit with the same companions in the same seats every trip.  Too, their conversations are generally the same each day; so when riders move to different seats, they disrupt the rhythm of the coach, like violinists stroking the wrong notes in an otherwise perfect symphony. 

Normally, I occupied a seat toward the rear of the coach.  He parked his Rascal in the front, close to the entrance, the area designated for the handicapped.  Two women always sat behind his Rascal and a man and a woman ensconced themselves in the seat across the aisle.  As The Cripple and these people boarded at an earlier stop than I in the morning there wasn’t much I could do to position myself close to him on the ride in.  Just as well, I guess, or I may have had a disturbed day.  In the evening I resolved to, and did, arrive earlier than any passenger and took the aisle position where the couple sat in the morning.

In the beginning, the two women who occasionally occupied that seat in the evening registered perturbation at my presence.  I recall the first few days clearly and not without relish.  On the first day, the occasional pair shrugged me off and found seats farther back.  The second day they paused and chatted with The Cripple before moving back.  The third day, they did not appear, nor the fourth; but on the fifth one of the women in the pair flung questioning eye darts my way and she and her partner engaged The Cripple in a long conversation, as if their standing between me and the Rascal rider would upset me and send me fleeing to the back.  I was unmovable, rooted, and permanent as Gibraltar.  By the end of the week, my presence had reduced their interaction with The Cripple to nods and hellos.

I jumped into the conversational void.  The Cripple and I began slowly as previously I had only half listened to him with no intention of understanding what he had to say.  Why would I care?  I discovered he was harder to comprehend than I had suspected, and straining to grasp what he said took on something of the weight of a mastering another language.  I persevered, however, and within a week I could volley on a reasonable exchange.  I learned he was a lawyer, and not small potatoes either, but among the top taxmen in the city.  Avoidance, though he called it legal minimization, was his forte.  Good thing, too, because his condition confined him to his Rascal and tax was something a person could do on the seat of his pants. 

A horrible, debilitating disease afflicted him and was slowly rotting his muscles.  Eventually he would be unable to commute to his city office, at which time he planned to work from his home office, and then, if necessary, from his bed.  He could not imagine not working.  I came to sympathize with him and wished I could help, if only in some small way.

Abe, not his name, though I think it fits him quite well, was married and the father of three children.  In his spastic style, he described his wife as beautiful, as a jewel, as a woman not deserving of what he was forcing her to endure.  She was a noble woman, he said, who stood by him as his disease squeezed life from him.  As for his children, two boys and a girl, the story was mixed.  The oldest two, a boy and girl, had graduated from college and were making their marks in the world.  The boy was a lawyer, like Abe, and already establishing himself as a top corporate counselor.  The girl was a musician; she was engaged in advanced study at a major conservatory.  She expected to compose and teach music.  Both were heartbroken over Abe’s affliction and were supportive of him and their mother.  They visited as often as they could, the son more frequently as he lived nearby.  The youngest son attended a prestigious university, close to Ivy League level, where he was a junior.  This son was a problem.  He’d been a difficult child, perhaps because Abe and his wife did not lavish the boy with attention, leading him to believe he was less than special and not always deserving of what he desired.  Unfortunately, as a result, he was unable to deal with the setbacks life often flings our way.  Abe’s illness was too much for the boy to bear.

This son’s behavior broke poor Abe’s heart.  He could tolerate most of his offensive habits — the boy’s abuse of alcohol and drugs, his vulgar language, his shabby dress and deficient personal hygiene, his brushes with the law.  But what stung and reduced Abe to tears, witnessed by me and others on the train, was the boy’s accusation that Abe was sick because he wanted to be sick; as if Abe willed his illness upon himself.  And for what reason?  As an excuse to abrogate his duty to his youngest child. 

This youngest child felt severely neglected.  Abe and his wife had lavished attention on the eldest, the first son.  They had treated their daughter well too, probably because she was the first and then, ultimately, the only girl.  As for the last son, well, it was as simple as lack of novelty.  Had he possessed a unique talent — some special creative gift such as debater or writer
— maybe his parents would have encouraged him and loved him.  Listening and absorbing Abe’s woeful tale, I discovered stirring in me empathy for the youngest son.  Yes, I could identify with his plight for it resembled my own retarded blossoming in the shadow of the ideal Abel who received everything my parents could give.  Perhaps Abe was as guilty as my parents had been?

When not wailing over the dissolute son, Abe would excoriate the bastard medicos and delighted when tort colleagues smote them for the benefit of those they tortured, maimed, or even killed, with their superior attitudes and gross lack of skill.  In Abe’s very personal experience, the lot of them were no good.  The young were cocky and inexperienced, given to misdiagnoses that caused patients to suffer longer than necessary.  The old were removed intellectually from the new practices of medicine and distanced from the agony of their charges by years of witnessing sickness and death.  Once I asked his opinion of his own doctors.  He answered they were the best at ameliorating the worse symptoms of his disease, but they were absolute dolts about curing him, not that any doctor, he conceded in his saner moments, could.  He blamed his dead-end plight on researchers, the bright boys and girls in white lab coats secreted away in laboratories, who played at experimentation and dreamed of vast glory and riches should they be so lucky as to stumble upon a cure for a big money disease, such as colon cancer.

Always at the conclusion of his diatribes, Abe confessed how relieved he was and grateful to me for being the stout and understanding person I was, someone with whom he could express himself honestly.  I generally smiled, happy to oblige, and contemplated how I might release him from the burden of his torturous life.  Usually I exited the train in quite a state of depression, asking myself why I insisted upon sitting near the saddest commuter in the city. 

Often I found myself wishing I could relieve Abe of his suffering.  Many an evening I contemplated how I might accomplish this task, but I knew there wasn’t much I could do about his condition, or his doctors, or his ameliorative treatments.  However, after hours of listening and commiserating, I hit upon how I might help poor Abe; not by curing his illness or lengthening his life, but by removing one of his great burdens, perhaps even transforming it into solace. 

During the summer, I learned the schedule of Abe’s troubled son, who lived at home during session breaks.  Summer found him working, of a fashion:  He was a bartender at a nightclub.  He spent his days in his room, sleeping, I presumed, as he typically arrived home never earlier than seven a.m.  He rarely left his parent’s house in the day, venturing forth in early evening for the club, which was a half-hour away when traffic cooperated.

As I’ve said, I’m not a social creature, preferring a set schedule some would call rigid, and the familiar confines of my apartment, even though The Pinstripes also favor it.  However, for the sake of Abe, my friendly and suffering spittle sprayer, I sacrificed.  I can’t explain why I grew to like Abe; why I eventually desired to help ease the burden life had saddled him with, and why I would have loved to add him to my collection of dear ones.  There it was, though.  I willingly made a personal sacrifice on his behalf.

I visited the nightclub briefly each night for a week to learn which evenings were slowest.  I didn’t stay long, and with each visit my perplexity increased over how I could possibly aid Abe if I could not tolerate the nightclub for more than five minutes.  I persisted, though, discovering Monday was the slowest evening; though by no means was the place empty or quiet.  On Mondays, unlike the other nights of the week, I could get a seat at the bar.  And on Mondays, the son wasn’t entirely occupied filling the waitresses’ orders.  On Mondays, he had time to converse with patrons.  In this regard, he was similar to his voluble father.

I can’t claim to have been an average young man, for even back then I was the contemplative type.  Thus, I wasn’t able to engage Abe’s son in conversation immediately and spontaneously.  I had to observe and eavesdrop on snippets of his palaver with other patrons to gain knowledge of his interests. 

Interestingly, it wasn’t I who initiated the relationship.  It happened on my second full Monday in the nightclub, after I’d been seated at the bar for two hours.  Abe’s son paused, placed his elbows on the bar, leaned into me, and asked what my “deal” was.  I did have a “deal,” as you know, but to satisfy his question I fabricated another “deal” on the spot.  I professed to enjoy the music.

To this very day and minute I remember his response, as it was definitive and extremely crude.  He spit into the rinse sink and labeled the band, for the club offered patrons live music, absolute shit, dreck, monkey music, meaning that a thousand monkeys strumming guitar strings would undoubtedly produce a better product.  His vehement condemnation surprised even me, no frequent clubber, or connoisseur of live acts. 

Naïve as I was about rock music, I could spot an agenda, and the source of his bitterness was clear to me.  I asked if he could do better.  He could, he said.  He and his band could play the club’s crappy act off the stage and into the shit house where it belonged, where, on further consideration, it should be flushed into the sewer with the rest of the shitty city’s shit.  Now, I’m not a person who swears or is comfortable in the presence of those who are vulgar, so I was sacrificing much for Abe.

Instantly, I created yet another “deal” loaded with immense, implied, benefit for him.  I said I’d have to see his music and hear his band to judge if it was as claimed.  I professed expertise as a recording professional.  When pressed by him, I offered that I was an agent who was casting about for a new act, accounting for my regular appearance at the club.  He wanted to assemble his band and perform for me, but I allayed his rabidity by suggesting he and I get together first to review the material he had written and arranged.  Should I like what he presented, then I would be pleased and insist upon him and his band performing for me.  He scribbled his address on a club napkin and we arranged a late night meeting for Friday.  I put him off until then as I could not rendezvous with him during the week, employed in the daytime as I was and requiring my sleep, disturbed and scant as it was even then.

The address, of course, was Abe’s house located in a prestigious suburb outside the city.  The address and commitment disconcerted me to some degree.  I had to travel a long distance, and I am not much for travel and have become even less a fan over the years.  To go back and forth in any reasonable amount of time — public transportation was unavailable to Abe’s house — I had to rent a car.  Fortunately, I possessed a driver’s license that I renewed faithfully though I knew I would rarely drive a vehicle.  It was a harrowing experience renting a car and driving it back and forth to Abe’s house.  I hope never to have such an experience again, or at least not in the dark of night.  The vision of my parents perishing in their collision with the pickup replayed in my mind the entire roundtrip. 

Though I arrived at night, I could easily discern that Abe’s property was a marvel.  Even in the faint silver moonlight, I could see he lived in an enormous manse.  Silhouetted against the sky, it resembled a small mountain range with several chimneys around its perimeter providing the jagged peaks.  Several smaller buildings were on the estate.  One looked like a stable.  Another was a huge garage sporting four doors with what appeared to be living quarters above.  Another was a cottage the size of a small suburban house.  The son lived in the cottage.  It was midnight when I knocked on the arched front door.

The door opened onto chaos.  I stepped into a large space that I took for the living room, though it looked more like a rehearsal hall abused for years by rock’s bad boys.  The walls were gray with grime.  Holes the size of a fist pocked them.  I could easily imagine the son striking out in anger or frustration.  Several amplifiers were stacked on each other to form a wall, the proverbial rock ‘n roll “wall of sound,” which blocked the windows overlooking the front walkway and the main house.  I assumed their location was intentional.  Candy wrappers and other detritus littered the floor, and what little carpet I could see was matted and dirty. 

The son attempted a gracious greeting of a sort by offering me a beer or stronger if I desired such.  I declined.  I said it was best we got down to work, as I was eager to hear his compositions.  Excited, he produced a folio of work, page upon page of staff paper thick with musical hieroglyphics.  I perused the sheets knowingly, nodding, grunting, humming nonsensically, and otherwise indicating interest.  The activity engaged my attention for several moments standing in the middle of the room.  When I felt sufficient time had elapsed, I asked with considerable enthusiasm to hear a piece, offering him one of the sheets of music.  He praised me for my sagacity in recognizing one of his best and most innovative compositions.  He knew every note by heart and didn’t need the musical notations to play it for me.  He turned to select a guitar — he owned four, each with different color schemes.  He chose the red guitar, slung the strap over his shoulder, and plugged into an amplifier.  Using the guitar as a pointer, he indicated a chair, a plain wood-backed chair estranged from a dining room set.  The seat cushion was torn and as filthy as the rest of the room.  I said I preferred to stand.  He shrugged, calling me the boss.  He strummed the instrument a couple of times, adjusted the tension on the strings, and, when the pitch of each satisfied him, asked if I was ready.  I said I was, and he proceeded to play.

I can’t say the piece was awful; nor can I report it was good, for I admit I have little ear for music, even though I had been something of a choral singer.  His playing seemed competent, and it surely was loud.  His voice was pleasing, harsh only when it appeared the song called for the effect of loud rasping.  I observed him closely and noted his eyes glassed over, indicating he was losing himself in the rhythm and words of his composition.  With his focus inward, I allowed my eyes to drift idly about the room, examining the motley curtains and their drawstrings; a chipped and thoroughly out-of-place vase that probably had not hosted a bloom in a dozen years; an antiquated black rotary telephone on an oval end table; and gaudy guitars lined neatly like soldiers. 

As I finished my survey, his performance drew to a crashing conclusion, and I returned my eyes to him in time to catch him locking his on mine.  Engorged blood vessels streaked his, and their general cast was pink.  His gaze was intense and expectant.  I responded by praising the performance and the song, and exclaiming I wanted to hear more.  My response delighted him and instantly he nested the guitar on its stand and proffered a folio of work. 

My survey of the room hadn’t been in vain, and with the folio in my grasp, inspiration struck me.  I suggested he pick his favorite, and then select a guitar for me.  I would accompany him, just as if we were playing together on stage.  He interpreted this as an affirmation of his talent and leapt at the opportunity to play with me.  He rummaged through the folio and found a piece he “loved” — his word.  As he knew it by heart, he gave the music to me.  He selected the green guitar for me, claiming it the best in the house, superior to the red ax he played.

Gripping the instrument and mulling the word “ax,” I recalled reading about rock musicians and their guitars.  They termed their electric guitars “axes.”  Until that moment with Abe’s son, I’d not thought much about a guitar as an ax.  But holding it by its neck, hefting it, noting its thinness, it seemed to me it could easily be construed as an ax, or perhaps more correctly a sledgehammer.  I knew it would do a splendid job.  As these thoughts went through my mind, the son turned his back on me to plug me into an amp.

Now, I will not claim to have played very well that evening, and maybe I didn’t play at all, at least in the conventional sense.  However, I did accomplish my goal of relieving Abe of a great burden, and I departed the cottage with a wonderful remembrance:  the sheet music of the son’s composition.  Though I can’t read the notations, I still take pleasure in holding and perusing it from time to time.

As for dear old Abe, he was absent from the train for two weeks, to the concern of everybody, including myself.  We speculated on his condition, hoping it had not advanced to its fated and immutable conclusion.  Then Abe reappeared.  We all were aghast at his state.  He had withered, as if his doctors had drained every ounce of fluid from him.  His frailness was pronounced.  We feared to touch the poor man, even to shake his feeble hand, frightened we might break it, or jerk it off in enthusiastic greeting.  A brave member of our little coach club mustered the courage to inquire about his condition, and he related a horrifying tale.  He told us, with great difficulty, with much spittle, and spilling a bucket of tears that his son had passed on.  Hearts sank at the vision of a father burying his own son.  I was very troubled by his announcement, for the effect of his son’s passing was the opposite of what I had imagined.  I suppose, in retrospect, I focused too much on the lousy behavior of the son, his terrible transgressions against his father, and missed the affectionate connection between a father and son, a bond that not even abominable behavior severs.

After a while, however, my allegiance changed, when I acknowledged life delivers to us exactly what we deserve. 

Staring at the pathetic hulk in his Rascal, I understood that the youngest son was the way he was because of the mess in the mobile chair.  Abe was an acerbic individual.  He was crude.  He was definitely without a heart, a natural for a profession built on cold numbers, indifferent to what those numbers might mean to poor slobs who counted on the government as provider of last resort.  Whatever professional compunction Abe felt — and I truly question if there was any at all — his physical suffering was appropriate and well earned.  Fact was I developed a feeling for the son, the poor rejected boy who was shunned by his father and had sunk his raw emotion into rock music, a form of rebellion older than I.  Before too long, tears welled in my eyes and spilled unto my cheeks.  My coach mates spied my emotional response to the son’s death and nodded in empathy.  Abe himself noted my tears and bowed his head in tribute to … what? … me? … his son?

I admit that, for weeks, the sight of Abe on the train was torture to me.  But I must be a peculiar person, as I could easily have moved to another coach, have transferred to the rear of the coach I favored each day.  In short, I had available to me many options for avoiding the palsied Abe and his Rascal and the memory of his tormented son.  Yet I chose to remain in the seat near Abe and subject myself to him.  For quite a long time after, I mulled upon why I insisted on subjecting myself to Abe.  I can only offer this:  stubbornness.  I preferred my seat up front in the coach.  It saved time boarding and disembarking the train.  I grew to enjoy the chatter of the people around me.  I developed a routine, and I am an individual who cherishes his routines.  I was not about to allow a mean, vindictive, greedy lawyer, a man who failed to recognize the true value of his own son, to drive me from what the purchase of my train ticket entitled me.  During those weeks I became quite angry at Abe.  The man couldn’t move worth a damn.  He could not speak without bathing everybody around him in his vile, diseased juice.  Yet, he was powerful and controlling and trying in every wily manner he could muster to banish me from the coach. 

Finally, I resolved that I would not take anymore of Abe.  I would confront the sorry deformed figure in the Rascal.

Happily Abe ceased to appear on the train.  Naturally, his extended disappearance set his retinue, of which I sadly included myself, abuzz; we all were concerned for the poor devil.  We concluded that his illness had taken a turn for the worse.  As time went on, Abe faded from the retinue’s memory, and it broke up.  I remained in my seat until I quit my city job for another, though I never forgot Abe.

CHAPTER 7:  VISITATION

I am a quiet person, as I have explained, the type who would rather keep to himself whenever possible.  Yet, I’m an individual who takes pleasure in the wild and in nature, and those things in it that are important to me. 

Since I do not often find myself in my sanctuary, especially in the cold months, I keep a selection of my relics in my apartment.  Whenever I visit my sanctuary, I return an item or two I have in my apartment.  I carefully return them to their places.  I am very skillful so no one who might stumble into my sanctuary would know I have returned or removed items.  I have invested several years perfecting the art of “returning and removing.”  In fact, I am so adept even moments after I have departed for home no one would guess I had visited my sanctuary.  I could reveal my secret as to how, but I don’t think I will, at least not here and now.  Suffice to say my relics are small and I carry precisely the right, unobtrusive tools with me when I visit.  These are compact instruments and no one would suspect I have them with me.

I have two micro sanctuaries in my apartment and store in them very special relics.  One is in my kitchen, in the freezer of my refrigerator.  Whenever I am looking for an apartment, for I move about, though not frequently, not being a transient, I insist on a sizable refrigerator.  Often the fridges you find in apartments are small with skimpy freezers.  The freezer is the important thing, as I require little refrigeration space for the modest amount of food I consume, mostly vegetables.  I store my perishable relics in the freezer. 

My bedroom closet is the site of my other sanctuary.  I don’t require much closet space, what with my simple wardrobe, and two pairs of shoes.  I use the top shelf you usually find in closets for my relics, which I keep in two small boxes.  One box is plain brown corrugated.  The other is more interesting.  It is an old hatbox once used by my mother.  Today most women, except perhaps for those older, do not wear hats.  In my mother’s day, hats were more common, and my mother was an aficionado of fine hat ware.  She would think nothing of spending ten or twenty dollars, considerable sums in her day, on a new hat.  My parents did not squabble much, but my mother’s hats were a sore point with my father; he believed they were a terrible waste of the money he labored hard to earn.  Whether he was an engineer or a technician, it doesn’t matter; but that he traveled and worked hard I have little doubt.  My mother blithely ignored his protests and accumulated an impressive collection.  I estimate she owned up to two-dozen hats at the time of her and my father’s untimely deaths.  Her practice was to store two hats in a box in an effort to conserve space.  Upon her death, I donated her hats and hatboxes to charity.  But I retained one box.  I kept the one not for sentimental reasons, but because it was very attractive.  This particular box portrays a scene in Paris.  The scene is rendered in a style mimicking that of Toulouse-Lautrec.  It’s a black and white montage of nineteenth-century Paris street scenes.  The scenes are beautifully enchanting.  I enjoy gazing at this box every time I open my closet door.  I imagine myself back in time in Paris, on a lovely summer day, in the company of frivolous women in delightful cafes with nothing but leisure before me.  (Of course, I could never, never travel to Paris.  It is too far for me, too far from the sustenance I need.  Also, I would feel very uneasy there since I don’t understand a word of French.)

The Pinstripes despise my relics.  I often think that if I dispose of my relics, The Pinstripes will vanish; they sense the presence of my valuable relics.  I’ve come to believe they either resent, or envy, my treasures.  I find myself pondering their attitude frequently, but their motives are inscrutable to me, as are many aspects of my life.

I remove and contemplate, really mediate on, my relics in the afternoons, and usually on weekends when I have adequate time to pay them the homage they have earned from me.  But I’m no mystic.  I do not sit cross-legged before an incense candle with the relic cradled in my lap or displayed like a monstrance on an altar before which I kneel.  This would imply religiosity and I am far from a religious person, although I received plenty of Catholic education in my youth.  My mother, a devote Catholic, had wished the same education for me, and I honestly believe she would have been pleased if I had announced a vocation for the priesthood.  Perhaps this would have pleased her because she could have shipped me off to a seminary feeder school, a boarding school far from her.  No, I am not religious by any means or measure.

I meditate on my relics in the bright light of day.  My practice is to remove the relic I wish to study from my freezer or my bedroom closet.  I always settle with it on my bed; a place to rest, and my refuge.  It is an island in a very cruel world, like England protected by the Channel, or our country safeguarded by two giant oceans. 

My bed has always served as protected territory for me.  I recall when my sweet, precious brother Abel died.  My parents tried to divert and soothe me with a pleasant trip after they laid Abel to his deserved rest.  But I was irreconcilable, to Abel’s demise and their neglect of me.  Upon our return, I took to my bed like an invalid and refused to budge from it.  Abel’s death devastated me.  I could barely bring myself to look upon his lovely face, which had exuded so much promise, still, lifeless, cosmetically and pitifully reanimated by the local undertaker, whom I suspected was a frustrated tragedian.  So I refused to budge.  I remained in my bed well after Abel was buried, for several weeks, coaxed from it only to eat out at nice restaurants, as if well-prepared and served food could make up for the ill treatment I knew to be impending from my parents, especially my mother.

Now I lie prone, resting on several pillows propped against the backboard, which allows me to function as if I am seated with my little artifact in my lap. 

If pressed, I’d have to admit the relic I spend most time with is Abel’s lock of hair.  When I hold Abel’s lock, he materializes before my eyes.  Of course, I understand it is not the real Abel miraculously incarnated.  I realize he is chimera — but he is so achingly real.  In this state, I’ve reached for him, touched him, and he has rewarded me with a smile, with the sensation of pliant, warm flesh transfused with the blood of life.  My Abel is the perfect brother, the boy I loved before he discovered and exercised his powers — his intelligence, his theatrical legerdemain, his horrid ego, and his despicable powers of manipulation, particularly of our parents.  But never mind his deficiencies, for now I am speaking of the occasional perfection Abel was, and has achieved into perpetuity.

Sometimes, as I meditate, my mind runs away on me and I recount the many relics I possess.  There was a time when I could keep every relic in my apartment.  Not any longer.  I don’t like admitting this, but I can’t recall every relic.  I have lived in several apartments in several cities, and in each of these locations I have collected remembrances.  In each location, the number became so great I was forced to find sanctuaries for them.  “How many?” I sometimes ask myself; and often these days I can’t count the total number.  I’ve accepted the situation, though.  I have my favorites, and these I take with me whenever I move.  I mention this now because I am currently mulling a move.  I am bored with my job, my employer, and my fellow employees.  I’m hoping a change will outsmart The Pinstripes.  Perhaps they will give up on me, and not follow.  Maybe I can get a restful night’s sleep.

My parents were not great travelers.  Periodically, they would take us on a trip.  We never traveled very far from our home, and never by any mode other than auto.  My father loved to drive, which is an irony.  Our trips would last a few days and, thus, require us to pack enough clothes to relieve my mother of washing during our excursions.  My parents owned two massive suitcases for this purpose.  These were of the old style hard cases, brown thatched in appearance, with compartments inside, and a flap attached at the hinge that separated top and bottom, essentially creating two storage spaces.  Upon their deaths, these two cases comprised a portion of my inheritance.  I still have them.  I use one case to hold my clothing.  I use boxes for the meager household supplies I own and I never move my furnishings, choosing to sell them; it’s much simpler and efficient.  I use the second case to hold my most precious relics in my mother’s hatbox:  Abel’s lock, Ruth’s jacket, and Eve’s belt.

I haven’t decided if I will pull up stakes.  Instead of moving out, I am contemplating requesting a leave of absence and using the time to embark on a grand tour of every place I have lived or visited.  It would be a trip down memory lane, and it would allow me to visit each and every one of my sanctuaries.  I could check up on the condition of my relics, resurrecting some from their long internments and inspecting them.  I could recharge my memory, relive the experience embedded in each, and decide which relic to relocate to my new home and my new sanctuary. 

Too, I could revisit sanctuaries I loved dearly when I lived in their vicinity.  The idea of some excite me nearly beyond endurance:  walking once again down the streets near my college; treading ground touched by Ruth’s airy step; strolling by her beautiful home and spying the sandy-haired husband and the children, observing how they are getting on.  I am not a person who gushes or displaces emotion of any sort under ordinary circumstances.  (Some have called me a cold fish.  Some have disparaged me by asserting I possess the black, empty eyes of a shark, and worse, as the shark’s would seem warm and friendly by comparison.)  But this nascent plan for my leave thrills me.

Today is Saturday and it is early afternoon.  I am alone, as usual.  What I have just related has stimulated me and caused me to visit with my true love, the one who betrayed me, but who nonetheless remains the dearest woman; the woman who yet inflames my heart; the woman whom I miss every day; whom I wish had been true; whom I would have made my wife because I believed her to be different than the general class of woman; who disappointed me by being the same as everyone else. 

Eve. 

I possess two Eve relics.  One I keep in my sanctuary described earlier.  Mediating on it is a highlight of my excursions there.  The other I keep close to me, in the beautiful Parisian hatbox bequeathed to me by my tragically passed-on mother. 

I reverently take the hatbox from the upper shelf of my closet and place it tenderly on my bed.  I move slowly; it’s almost like seeing myself on film performing in slow motion.  I lift the lid with two hands and set it next to the box on the bed.  The box and the lid are on the left side of the bed.  My Catholic education holds me in its grip and, thus, I believe in the right of anything, including my bed, holding significance.  Eve shares the hatbox with Ruth and my brother.  I have stacked my treasured relics of each, separating them with thick barriers of pure white tissue paper.  When I decided to place these three relics in the hatbox, I considered several ways of organizing them and found stacking the most sensible.  I also very carefully ruminated on the best way to order them.  Alphabetically?  Age?  Size of article?  I decided on chronology of acquaintanceship.  My Abel occupies the bottom.  Ruth rests in the middle.  Eve resides on the top.  I’m certain they would approve. 

I pick up Eve’s relic with both hands.  It is her favorite belt.

Eve favored black, and her belt reflects this.  She was always one to buy clothing and accessories of the finest quality.  Her belt is an extraordinary and superb treasure.  It is wide and thick, but as it is crafted from the best quality hide, it is buttery and delightfully pliable.  On the entire length of leather, a true craftsman has hand-tooled a wondrously intricate farm scene.  Yes, Eve’s belt portrays in relief, fields, a maize crop, cattle, and a farmer, his wife, and their children.  Silver caps the point of the tongue, and the buckle is silver too.  Both have tarnished a bit resting in my mother’s hatbox.  As with the leather, the precious metal is etched, both pieces with maize plants.  The intaglio is darker than the surface silver and the contrast is quite pleasing. 

Eve was slim, but you would not guess it based on her belt:  It is long, as if made for a man’s robust waist.  She wound the belt around her waist twice, cinched it in the last hole.  She wore it somewhat like the girdle you see in renditions of Guinevere, wrapped around her waist, hanging from her hips, with a long length dropping erotically between her legs, down to her knees.  Eve’s belt did not descend as far as Guinevere’s, but it was no less provocative.

I love tracing the pastoral scene with the tips of my fingers.  The sensation is sensual and arousing and my face flushes pink, for I am a modest person who usually eschews explicit descriptions.  The belt leather is very soft.  Touching it is almost like laying hands on Eve, almost like having her in my bed once again.  It has been a while since Eve wore the belt, more than three years, perhaps longer; I sometimes find it hard to keep track of fleeting time.  Yet in my hands it stills imparts her warmth.  This is probably my own body heat after I’ve been holding the belt for a while, but I like to imagine it is a sign of her vitality.  Though she is no longer with me, she is still part of me, and that can never be otherwise.  Her beautiful fragrance is still embedded in the belt.  It is an unusual aroma, a blend of her perfume, a pungent scent once smelled never forgotten, and the natural piquancy of her essence.  I hold the belt to my nose and breathe her in and, after doing so, I can cast my eyes anywhere in the room and see her lithe black form, and it is as if she never left me.

I prefer seeing the beautiful and true Eve.  I like to remember Eve before Adam.  But sometimes, I see her as she appeared that night.  I simply cannot help myself.  It was several days after the Christmas party.  With considerable effort, I traveled to her apartment.  Even today I cannot truly say what I had in mind — forgiveness, punishment, I don’t know.  I entered surreptitiously, slipping in when another tenant buzzed in a friend, not because I suspected her of anything but because I wanted to surprise her, by appearing suddenly after our little period of estrangement and demonstrating my understanding and forgiving nature. 

Stroking the silver tips, running my nails into the intaglio maize, I see her, as if she is here, just across the room in the frame of my bedroom door, after I knocked on her apartment door; after I heard her laugh on the opposite side of that door, her laugh from the warehouse; after she opened her door; after her radiant, excited expression transformed to — oh, how I hate recalling this — shock.  Stronger than shock, abhorrence.  No, stronger yet:  fear.  Why would she fear her love?  She couldn’t; she just couldn’t.  I knew instantly it had to do with Adam.  He had poisoned her!

Politely, I asked if I might enter.  She glanced behind herself to where I knew she kept a clock.  Hesitantly, she let me in, erasing doubt I may have foolishly harbored about her reaction to me, about the influence and presence of him.  I took the door handle from her, closed the door for her, and turned the deadbolt.  I said, “Safety first, my little queen.  You never know who might be lurking in the building.”  She backed into the room, the living room, and lowered herself onto the sofa.  I sat down in the matching side chair.  She asked if she could get me anything.  I watched her for a moment, scrutinizing every detail of her attire.  “Your belt, Eve,” I said.  She repeated my request in the high pitch of surprise, “My belt?”  “It’s so lovely on you,” I said.  “You seem so incomplete without it.”  Without acknowledging me, she scurried into her bedroom, with me behind her, watching.  Back in the living room, she adorned her waist with the exquisite belt that I am now stroking, I am smelling; that I am rubbing tenderly against my cheek.  “Lovely,” I said, taking her into my arms, grasping the belt.  “Allow me to adjust it for you.”  I removed it from around her waist and in a blink I wrapped it around her wonderfully long neck.  She writhed.  I tautened the belt, her resistance exciting me.  She opened her mouth, but, really, the time for apologizing was long since past.  No, I would abide no placating supplication.  I covered her mouth with mine, sucked in her hot breath, absorbed the essence of her life, incorporated her being into me.  With her life’s breath came her tongue, which I clenched with my teeth and severed and spit onto the chair I’d only moments ago been seated upon.  What a revolting mess, just terrible, but, of course, it couldn’t be helped.  I tightened the belt still more and pushed her back onto the sofa.  Straddling her, I gurgled, for my mouth was soaked with her blood, “Eve, I love you.  I want you with me always, always and forever.”  I spat her blood onto the sofa, guilty for acting in such an uncharacteristically indecorous manner.  But my behavior didn’t trouble Eve in the least, as she stared at me, vacantly.  I gently planted a sloppy red kiss on her forehead.

Next I see myself in the bathroom.  I was cleaning Eve’s belt, admonishing myself for my untidy appearance, when the buzzer sounded.  Someone was calling on Eve, and I knew who he might be.  I went into the living room, tossed Eve’s belt behind the door, and pressed the entry buzzer.  I dashed into the kitchen, opened and closed Eve’s cabinets, admiring her organizational skills and neatness as I went, until I found the pots and pans.  There it was, a wonderfully heavy, black cast iron skillet.  I lugged it into the living room.  I unlocked Eve’s front door, opened it a crack, and positioned myself behind it, far enough away to avoid him knocking me flat against the wall.

He pushed open the door, stepped in, opened his mouth to exclaim something, who knows what, and I brought the skillet down on his head.  That satisfying fleshy bonk and crunch and “Oh” still reverberate in my mind.  I closed the door and said, “I can’t say I’m happy to see you, Adam.”  He said nothing, not even as I removed his clothes, everything except his underpants and socks, articles I did not need, and if I had, certainly would never have worn.  I dragged the raggedly breathing Adam into the kitchen, saying to Eve as we passed her, “Excuse us, but we have a bit of culinary work to attend to.  Your dinner, my little queen.”  I believed she smiled at us, smiled at the playful boys.  In the kitchen, I scavenged a few of Eve’s appliances — the toaster, microwave, can opener, the little radio she kept on the counter.  I used the cords to bind Adam to one of the two chairs that went with Eve’s charming table for two.  When I was happy with my knots, I laid him down.  On his back, feet in the air, he reminded of a half naked astronaut atop his rocket ready for takeoff. 

I’m usually a patient person, but I did not have time to wait for Adam to revive according to his own meandering schedule.  I hastened him along by dousing him with cold water.  He woke up after a couple of soakings.  Adam was as recalcitrant as always. 

Also, he was an angry fellow.  He awoke shouting.  Well, I could not tolerate his antics, not in an apartment with who knew how thin walls.  I removed his socks, balled them, and shoved them into his mouth.  It was like turning a loud radio down to low, but it served well enough.  After all, part of the pleasure was hearing him.

“Adam,” I said, busying myself with heating the skillet, “are you up on your English history?  Right, be more specific.  English punishment in, say, the Elizabethan era?  Drawing and quartering ring a bell? “  I guessed it did indeed, judging by his increased agitation.  “You are so pitiful,” I said.  “I hope you realize that.  I can’t draw or quarter you in Eve’s matchbox kitchen.  But if your memory is good, Adam — is it good?”  I removed the chef’s knife from Eve’s knife block and flashed it before his disturbingly wide eyes.  I do believe I worried they would pop from their sockets and spoil our game, our delightful playtime.  “Evisceration is just the ticket.  Adam, I know you wanted to be with Eve tonight.  Now, please, stop shaking your head.  You know you did.  You wanted to … how to put your intentions … make a meal of my little queen.  Yes you did.  How about we turn things around a tiny bit and make a meal for her of you?”  I braced the chair and him against the cabinet and incised him from neck to navel, not deeply enough to injure his organs but enough to open him.  I also incised two perpendicular lines top and bottom, allowing me to open him up as I would a carton.  Adam did not appreciate my efforts in the least.  I gingerly sliced the abdominal membrane over his intestines, cut them free, and proceeded to unreel them in front of his quite astonished eyes.  When I finished removing them, I held the entire ugly mess up to his face to allow us both to delight in the display of his filthy innards.  “No turning back now,” I smiled, tossing them into the corner.  “How unfortunate,” I said, “we’re missing the starved dogs, like in merry ole England.  But look, we have the sizzling charcoal, though in our case it’s Eve’s skillet.” 

I believe the last sound Adam heard was me performing my chef duties, sautéing his liver, humming the dwarf’s tune, though without the whistling; I’ve never been adept at whistling, another of Abel’s irritating skills.

I placed Adam’s cooked organ on a tasteful white plate.  I carried it into the living room.  “Enjoy, my little queen,” I said, setting the plate in her lap and stepping back with a flourish of my hand.

Showering in Eve’s bathroom, I replayed the evening’s events several times in my mind as I scrubbed myself squeaky clean.  I had to attend to my privates twice.  I simply could not stop myself from releasing, not uncustomary for me.

I bagged my clothes, put on Adam’s, took the belt, tidied up the apartment as best I could, paying attention to all the important things, and bid my little queen and her consort a good night.

Even at this moment, with Eve’s belt in my hands, that evening is vivid to me, almost palpable.  And so it is whenever I spend time with my relics or in my outdoor sanctuary rekindling my cherished relationships. 

And now I find I must again clean myself.

 

CHAPTER 8: FIFI

Fifi was my first official relic. Fifi was our family dog, the pet my parents owned when I was a little boy. Fifi was not her real name. It wouldn’t do to relate the actual name of even my dog. But Fifi is as frivolous as the dog’s real name, and it fits her breed. She was a poodle that my mother had groomed with the classic retriever chauffer: puffballs. She was quite a ridiculous animal yet simultaneously cute and lovable.

While she was technically my mother’s dog, Fifi spent most of her time with me and Abel. Fifi, Abel, and I were a tiny team. Whatever we played, Fifi joined in. In my day, the Wild West and cowboys were the rage, and every child, boys and girls, required cowboy hats, six guns, and holsters. Parents in those days didn’t object to children playing with toy guns, and we children wanted our weapons to be as realistic as possible. Never did I hear of a police officer shooting a child because he assumed the kid had a real gun, instead of a fake. Things like that simply didn’t happen back then.

We had a large yard and our area was hilly, which was ideal for playing cowboys and Indians and other western-style shoot-’em-up games. A hilly ridge ran perpendicular to the side of our house. On the ridge years before my parents bought the house, the former owners had planted several lilac bushes. Over the years, these had grown very high, taller than the average man, and wide, too, eventually merging as one continuous and strikingly long and dense bush. Inside the enormous bush were holes and paths, making it an ideal clubhouse and hideout. When Fifi, Abel, and I played our shoot-up games, we ran though the giant bush screaming, barking, and mouth-firing our six guns. Since I was older, I always elected to be the cowboy, relegating Abel to Indian. If we played gunfighter, I was always the good guy, usually the righteous marshal, and Abel was the villainous killer. Fifi was always my sidekick in these games. I loved the tiny little dog; she was a miniature variety of poodle. But often I strongly resented her for not being a bigger, brawnier dog more becoming for a cowboy like myself, or suitable for saddling, as would have been a Great Dane.

I suppose my resentment was more of an issue than I realized at the time. The times when I’m on the street and spy a small dog, poodle or other breed, Fifi instantly springs to mind, and with her a powerful sense of guilt. I’m afraid I mistreated the dear pet. I also encouraged Abel to abuse the poor thing. Our assaults on Fifi might seem small offenses, almost insignificant, certainly childish, not warranting strong retributive emotion of any sort, especially when you weigh our behavior against that of today’s children. However, I am a sensitive soul and our maltreatment of the dog fills me with regret.

As an example, Fifi had her favorite toys purchased for her by my indulgent mother. They were disgusting objects, torn, punctured, and sticky with Fifi’s potent drool. Honestly, they were eyesores and, doubtless, breeding grounds for the most frightening strains of germs. I never touched them. Never. I did, however, urge Abel to pick them up and hide them in places from which Fifi would find it difficult to retrieve them. At best, I goaded him into secreting them in places where if she did locate them and attempt to regain possession, she’d break a household decoration particularly dear to my mother. Just thinking about this excites me. What screaming! My mother was such a calm, self-possessed woman beyond our house; nobody would have believed her at-home antics.

Offered as another instance, Abel and I would roundup Fifi like drovers did cattle on our favorite television programs. Abel would pin her securely to the floor. I would squat over the panicked, struggling creature, call to Abel to immobilize her muzzle, and when assured it was, pass gas directly into her little wet snout. Abel would release her with a nose full, and we would convulse at her violent sneezes and her vigorous snout rubbing. We would howl and glow in our brotherly camaraderie.

Fifi was a generally agreeable and pliable creature, but sometimes she’d raise her hackles in the face of our playfulness. She’d rear back and attempt to fend us off with deep growls. To no avail, however, as Abel and I were persistent tormentors, though we didn’t view our actions as torture but as fun. Unfortunately, a day arrived on which poor Fifi could not restrain herself and it led to very sorry events indeed.

Abel was an adorable boy, an irritating augmentation to his talent and intelligence. I say this with only the deepest love, respect, and longing for my poor brother. Additionally, he was something of an adventurer. I believe he actually enjoyed playing point man when we engaged in rough play with Fifi. And so it was on that fateful day. He was wrestling Fifi into position for one of my famous gas attacks. I remember distinctly I’d planned an especially powerful display of gastrointestinal power. I was very excited and admit urging on Abel in a rabid fashion. After all, you can sustain a peak for just so long before dissipation sets in. I guess Abel tried to satisfy me a bit too eagerly, and Fifi intuited clearly what was to befall her. She snapped her head around and sunk her teeth in Abel’s wrist. He released her with a curdling screech and began flailing his arm about. The gash looked bad, but worse still, she nicked his radial artery as I learned later, which accounted for the globs of blood he scattered about the room, and even on me.

Our mother was occupied in another part of the house, when she caught wind of Abel’s wailing. I’m certain I would not have liked Fifi sinking her small, sharp teeth into my wrist, but I don’t believe I would have created such a ruckus if the dog had. I’m the self-sufficient type, and would have cleaned and bandaged the wound myself. I would have feigned utter surprise when my parents inquired about the bandaging at dinner, as doting guardians should. In any case, my mother charged into the room, assessed the scene, and drew the wrong conclusion: She assumed I was the cause and accused me of tormenting the dog and involving innocent Abel in my nefarious activity, yet again. While angry at her, Abel, and Fifi, I kept to myself. I didn’t respond. I left the room quietly. But I did not soon forget the pain of her sharp words.
Unhappily, I allow misdeeds against me to fester. I readily admit it is a bad trait and a terrible weakness in my character. I can only hope my strengths outweigh my flaws, and that the years have replaced many of my weaknesses with at least modicums of fortitude.

Then, though, I believed myself woefully misjudged and wrongfully accused in the Fifi and Abel incident. After all, it was not I who had chomped Abel’s delectably tempting wrist; who caused the darling little brother to recline in the hospital for several hours; to suffer five stitches and a tetanus booster. The culprit in this affair was clearly Fifi, who, I indignantly noted, went unpunished. In fact, she seemed to earn special attention and extra food treats from my mother, who I’ll be the first to admit held a soft spot in her heart for the good Lord’s dumb creations. The sight of her royal treatment only heightened my resentment, anger, and desire for sweet revenge.

I intended merely to strike fear in the pooch. I figured a bit of Skinnerian reinforcement would educate the dumb animal and make her more accommodating the next time Abel and I got frisky, for I knew, in spite of his caterwauling and our mother’s admonishments, the day would arrive as surely as The Pinstripes visit me now.

After checking to be certain my mother and Abel were preoccupied — she spent much more time with him than she did with me, helping him develop his musical and intellectual gifts 
– I scooped up Fifi and carried her outside. What a loving and obsequious creature she was, happily willing to give herself over to whatever I planned for her, so wonderfully trusting. Trust is such an important virtue. And there simply is too little of it in this world these days. I believe a scintilla more and the world would be an infinitely better place.
I carried Fifi to the swing set, later the site of dear, talented Abel’s horrible demise, and placed her on the ground. Oh, she was such an excited doggie. She scampered this way and that. She circled me and the swing set. She paused to sniff the grass and the dirt, lingered by a leg of the swing, having discovered an intriguing odor. She stopped frequently to stare up at me, as if inquiring about the activity I had planned for us. She gave me the impression she’d forgotten the gas-expelling affair and acted as if she expected all was forgiven and in that moment, gazing into her warm and enthusiastic eyes, I found myself able to forgive and forget. I conceded maybe Abel had brought his suffering upon himself, and lovely Fifi, well, the cute creature was only doing what came natural. Looking back, I wish I had listened to my forgiving nature and had not been as bent on redeeming the pain of my brother. Abel, for all his wondrous intelligence, talent, and engaging love, was a manipulative son of a gun, that’s for sure.
I’d pocketed a length of twine from a kitchen drawer and produced it when Fifi and I arrived at the swing set. Fifi attacked the dangling brown hemp immediately. She yapped and jumped. She bent low on extended front legs and growled playfully. She circumnavigated the ground beneath the suspended twine like a dervish. And she stared puzzled as I tied an end of the twine to a crossbar that stabilized the tubular structure.

Once I’d knotted it tightly I picked up Fifi and affixed the length to her collar. What a lovely color, indeed, red aniline leather studded with rhinestones, a choker suitable for a queen. Satisfied it would hold her puny weight, I lowered and released her. She hung like meat in a butcher’s window, her hind legs four or five inches shy of the earth. She was a calm girl until she realized she was suspended in air, and when the realization hit her she panicked. I believe the affair would have ended well for both of us had she remained calm. She would have learned a lesson, and my pride in defending my brother would have been fulfilled. But she panicked, and caused her collar to turn sufficiently and function as a noose. She choked slowly, fighting for every second of life, until she stopped.

Of course, she shocked me. My first reaction was panic and self-castigation. How could I have been such a careless boy to have strung her up? My action was the reason the poor precious creature, the object of such joy for Abel and me, the love of my mother, hung lifeless before me. My impulse was to untie her and rest her remains on the ground, and then go into the house and announce her demise. But hasty action is often regretted. Fortunately, I am a man of the mind, a person who ponders. And what I pondered on this occasion was satisfaction of curiosity. I wondered if the weight of her body, small as it was, would stretch her neck, and if so to what length and how long might such elongation take. I calculated I had time, as Abel was either honing his piano skills with my mother beside him guiding him, or he was napping, which he often did. So I waited and observed. Oh, what a scientific mind I possess, even at that young age. Fifi, once loved as a frisky pet, in those moments I admired as a grand experiment. Did her neck stretch? Yes, it seemed too in the several minutes she hung.

As I allowed my experiment to progress, I contemplated my next steps. I could and probably should have gone inside and told my mother of poor Fifi’s untimely departure from life. In fact, I had concocted a tale. Fifi, in my tale, had espied a rabbit scampering in our yard, a common event. My mother despised rabbits, for they nibbled her flowers to shreds. My gentle mother would certainly have shot every bunny daring to turn her beds into cafeterias had she owned a gun, or had Abel not regarded the little bounders as adorable. Fifi, as she often did, chased after a rabbit. The frightened animal dashed to escape Fifi’s small but nonetheless fierce jaws, zigzagging around the yard. In my tale, the wily rabbit darted straight for the swing set with Fifi hot on its fluffy tail. When the animal turned sharply, poor Fifi did not, crashing instead into a leg of the swing set, resulting in a broken neck, and early death.
Interestingly, the very chore of concocting an excuse for my parents again raised a tide of anger in me — bitter, repulsive, gushing, bilious and gastric poison. I would not be in the situation I was if Fifi hadn’t been such a bad, terrible, self-willed dog. My anger flowed heavy and burned in my gut, my brain, and my eyes, and I cast about for anything to grab, any bludgeon laying about, and locked eyes on a branch. I picked it up and grasped it tightly, and then in my very best baseball batter’s form swung and struck Fifi’s limp form again and again until the acid of my anger receded and my normal harmonious self reappeared.

In that moment of recovery, genius flashed in my brain, sprang neuron to neuron instilling warm happiness in me. Why should I pay emotionally for what Fifi had clearly brought upon herself? And why honor her with a noble hunter’s death? I decided to treat her like the enemy of our family she’d proven herself to be. I decided to bury her and keep mum about her disappearance.

Fifi’s absence didn’t register with my mother until evening when she noticed the pet’s water bowl was full. Fifi wasn’t the biggest liquid lapper in town, but never did she allow an afternoon to pass without visiting the bowl a couple of times and consuming an inch or so. My mother searched the house, calling for Fifi, until her shrill voice grated me into a near blow up. When my father arrived home — he was on the scene for this, I recall; when he arrived, she enlisted his help scouring the house and moving the search outside until the light of early evening vanished. My mother searched relentlessly for Fifi and tenaciously clung to her belief the dog would never leave home of her own volition. Only after several weeks did she concede Fifi was gone forever. She believed right up until the inconsiderate pickup driver ended her life that Fifi had been dognapped.

Secretly, I visited Fifi, not just her collar, which I stored in an impenetrable baggie and kept with her. I stashed her body deep in the lilac bush under a makeshift grave of twigs and leaves. During the time the little creature putrefied, I kept Abel away from our favorite play area, transferring our games of cowboys and Indians to the field near our house. I, however, visited Fifi every week to observe the process of her decay. I was a curious child and was possessed of that scientific nature I mentioned. My activity, which could appear strange to some, might be regarded as laboratory work, though I did not write about the process in a notebook. I inscribed that information in my mind where it remains today.

After Fifi dissolved to nothing but fur and bones, I dug her a proper grave in the lilac bush, and Abel and I resumed playing there.

I cherish Fifi’s red collar, and it is among my favorite relics. I had terribly mixed feelings about the poor doggie. I loved her. I hated her when she bit Abel and I punished her. Then I loved her again in her suffering. But then I despised her for forcing me to extremes in punishing her. Finally, I loved her forever after my anger had cleared and I realized she was merely an innocent, doing what came natural, and that Abel was the real culprit. I pay the poor, precious creature homage as often as The Pinstripes will allow.

CHAPTER 9:  EXPIATION

My desire to visit my sanctuaries at home and away is strong, approaching irresistible, as urgent as I imagine as an addict’s yearning for a fix.  That much is true.  However, I cannot allow myself satisfaction as often as I would like.  You might say in this regard I’m monastic, empowered with the iron will of a monk, the modern version, as many of the medieval types were rascals.

The Pinstripes are the reason and the obstacle.  No, they do not appear to me in the daytime, but any day I pay homage to my relics, they intensify their crowding intrusion into my night. 

The Pinstripes manage to elevate their torment of me in a couple of insidious ways.  First, they present themselves in sharper focus.  I can distinguish the pores on their faces, and practically see inside those pores to their centers, where their black hearts pump their vile blood.  Their teeth are in such perfect relief I am able to see the living film coating them.  I see the stringy film connect upper and lower lips when they open their mouths to mumble at me.  Too, each thin strand of hair reveals its scales and under the skin the follicles seem to pulsate, tiny throbbing bulbs.  Their noses flare, their nostril wings flap out, and the interior hirsute landscapes are clearly visible.  And just for one or two, not the first and second rows, or the rows extending beyond my sight.  I can’t see these far legions distinctly, but I can sense in them what I see in those in the front.

I’ve described clearly the fine detail I can see in their clothing, their pinstripe suits, their precisely tailored shirts, their exactly knotted neck ware.  They are more than real; bigger, brighter, and more sharply drawn than anything in the daytime world.  Could they be more than they are?  Yes, they always are more after I’ve spent time with my relics. 

In these after-times, the things living in their clothing present themselves.  These are creatures of the dead.  In these times it is as if I am observing The Pinstripes through a microscope.  I can see down to and through the weave of their fabric, to and through the crosshatching of the threads; and gliding in and out of these thread squares are white creatures, bleached little beasts, maggots maybe, but with ugly red mouths, not bloody, but worse, on the verge of hemorrhaging, with bulging pulsating lips, on the edge of gore.  They have eyes, too.  Red dots, more like circles fabricated on a punch press than organic growths.  The creatures use their red eyes to stare at me.  But there’s more.  They wiggle and wriggle and slither and snake in and out of the thread squares and, when they sense me, they pause briefly.  They raise their heads, small knobs at the ends of their pasty bodies, and lock onto my eyes.  They work their mouths, mimicking speech, and then they resume their travels through the clothing of The Pinstripes.

They are reminders.  They are the lyrical skeletons with scythes that gather those with punched cards, like bony street cleaners caging litter, except these crawl, trail slime, and, if they ever do mature, I imagine metamorphose into pesky shit flies.  At their sight, I mourn all those whom I have loved and who have passed on.  These creatures have treated my loved ones as mere meal.  I see them festering in my lovely Eve’s stomach, and pouring from her mouth and ears and eyes and her other forfeited orifices.  I see whomever I visited earlier in the day suffering the same fate.  This is punishment, I know.  Punishment for my earlier enjoyment, for the pleasure touching a relic brought me, for the remembrance of delightful times shared.  And it is a reminder that no matter how hard I wish my lovelies once again with me, they never will be.  They are gone forever.

I wonder, under my bedclothes precisely arranged and drawn tightly taut and tough like armor, if The Pinstripes are straining to convey this idea to me.  For on the nights after visitation days, their mumbling assumes more urgency.  Their mouths open wider, move faster.  Their tongues wag with ferocity.  Their mumblings achieve a crescendo nearly forcing me to shout at them either to shut up or annunciate and reveal clearly what it is they wish to tell me; what they wish of me.  I don’t scream, however.  I did once, and the consequences — the police and the psychiatrist — were frightening and almost fatal to me.  I shake instead.  I vibrate as if The Pinstripes are spraying me with ice water.  I sweat with fear.  The ice scorches my skin like bare flame.  I am so frenzied, so strained with fright and the enormous effort of controlling myself, I sometimes become incontinent.  Thankfully, incontinence occurs rarely; but those times have been disturbing and uncomfortable, for I cannot rise from my bed, wash myself, and change the bedclothes.  I can’t budge, for The Pinstripes crowd around me.  If I get up from my bed and shed my armor, they will seize me.  That will be like death to me, for if The Pinstripes seize me, I don’t know what will happen.  What happens after death?  Perhaps nothing.  Yet, perhaps something.  The prospect of either is paralyzing.

These occurrences are rare because I am careful.  I have a scientific mind regarding aspects of life; my life in particular.  I am a keen observer of others and myself.  Employing the scientific method after a couple of horrific times, I concluded The Pinstripes intensified their persecution of me after truly wonderful visits with those I loved beyond life itself:  Abel and Eve, Ruth, my lovely Avon lady, and the dear pooch Fifi.  These legions of the night punish me for the few minutes of pleasure and enjoyment I am able to eke from life.

However, I am not a wimp scared by mere voices, one who thinks words can truly harm.  The Pinstripes toss more my way than inscrutable mumbles.  Their tongues are horror shows.  The red-eyed, bloodsucker-mouthed, pasty creatures I described above, these heart attack inducers, become the tongues of The Pinstripes.  The Pinstripes’ tongues transform from pink flappers to grotesque deathly white creatures; actually they are three monsters splitting from the tip of the death tongues.  Moreover, in these instances, The Pinstripes develop the ability to extend their deformed tongues great distances; the tongues themselves transmogrify into white snakes, hundreds, thousands, millions of them aiming at me; a fusillade of white and red agony.

In the beginning, I bore these assaults on my happiness in my stride.  After all, I reasoned, a little pain accompanies every pleasure.  At least this has been the case for me and those close to me.  Yes, it is agonizing to lie in my bed and endure The Pinstripes night after night.  In fact, it is the reason I cracked early on; why the police came to my apartment; why I spent a year and thousands of dollars I could hardly spare, sitting upright on the shrink’s couch.  After my outburst and sessions with my psychiatrist, I decided to remedy the situation by severely reducing visits to my outside and indoor sanctuaries.  Best to deprive myself in order to reduce and quell The Pinstripes most vicious visits.  It’s something like dieting to lose weight.

As I’ve already mentioned, I am a quiet person.  What I haven’t revealed is that I am sensitive and introspective as well.  Unlike most in today’s hectic world, I pause from time to time to reflect on my life, to review my actions, to contemplate how my life has affected the lives of others.  I devote a portion of my sanctuary visits to self-examination.  But sensitivity carries a price, a very high toll in my case, for I believe it is the reason The Pinstripes have selected me, visit me regularly, and intensify their visits on those occasions when I am most vulnerable — immediately after a session with one of my precious relics and my most prized memories.  I’ve applied considerable effort to fathoming The Pinstripes and their motivation.  Sometimes I am of the opinion they lack feelings of their own.  They cannot empathize with people.  They know I can, and they are attempting to capture, suck from me, this ability.  If they should gain it, they will leave me and get on with their lives.  I sometimes think they are the souls of all those with stony hearts.  It would be easy to allow them to overwhelm me and gorge themselves on my sensitive nature, but if I succumb to their pleadings and demands, where would I be?  I fear I’d be a dried, empty husk, half of whom I am, forever unable to establish connections with people.  Goodness knows, it is difficult enough now. 

 

CHAPTER 10:  LAZARUS

Every religion has its share of odd beliefs, but among the strangest I think is reincarnation.  To believe your life is one stage in a vast, cosmic, round-robin contest in which you find yourself reborn as easily in the form of a dog as a human being is a concept that is nutty.  Yet I have to admit I have begun to doubt my conviction on the absurdity of reincarnation.  The reason is the new family that moved into the apartment at the end of the hall.

This family is of the modern type: a mother, a young daughter, who cannot be more than four, and a boy.  They appear poor to me and I believe the family receives government assistance to live in my building, though the mother works. 

It is the boy who has me speculating there might be some substance to the wacky idea of constant rebirth.  The boy is ten and I have found myself compelled to do something unusual for me.  I have struck up an acquaintanceship with him.  The reason is that the boy strongly resembles my long-lost, pined-for brother Abel. 

Lazarus, the name I’ve chosen for him, possesses many of Abel’s physical characteristics.  Lazarus is small for his age, like Abel was.  His features are sharply hewn.  His hair is fine and long, as had been Abel’s.  And the boy is precocious in the same way as Abel.  In particular, Lazarus demonstrates a wondrous musical talent.  He isn’t a pianist, probably given to the limited financial circumstances of his mother.  He does, however, play the violin in his grade school orchestra, as well as the acoustic guitar.  He owns an inexpensive acoustic and often, passing his apartment, I hear him strumming it.

I was not seeking a friend and though I noticed the family moving in several weeks ago, I had no intention, nor any need, to befriend them.  But as it happened I was returning from work the day they were moving their meager belongings from a battered pickup into their apartment, which is on the first floor, the same as mine.  While our apartments are on the ground floor, there is a half flight of stairs from the street to the entrance.  They had nobody helping them and they were moving large objects; at least they were large for those doing the hauling:  a woman, a small boy, and a barely-beyond toddler girl, who was more interference than help.  As I strolled down the street and approached the stairs, I saw the woman and the boy struggling with the kitchen table, an ugly thing with curved chrome legs and thrift shop shoddiness.  I planned to step around them, when the woman yelled at the boy, who was losing his grip.  Her yelping shifted my attention to the boy and, in an instant, Abel materialized before my eyes.  Abel, as hard as it was for me to believe, occupied this boy.

Uncharacteristically, I offered the mother and Lazarus my assistance.  They set the table down on the sidewalk and she tried fending me off by thanking me profusely and claiming my help wasn’t necessary.  They simply required a short rest, she said.  I don’t know why people can’t accept a favor graciously.  I suppose the answer is that people either don’t wish to impose and such intrusion embarrasses them; or they don’t want to display their weakness in front of you; or they do not wish to be obligated to the Samaritan, which I understand completely.  Whatever the reason, the Samaritan sometimes has to insist on and beg to be of help, hammering at them until they concede the obvious; that they do need your assistance.

Though the table wasn’t particularly heavy, it was bulky, and I was exhausted by the time she and I wrestled the thing into her apartment.  I stood awkwardly in her little kitchen, a galley like mine, waiting.  Finally, she said she appreciated my help and didn’t wish to impose, but they had a sofa and two beds in the pickup.  I admit I hesitated offering my services further, until Lazarus appeared in the kitchen with his sister.  At the sight of him, I knew I had no alternative but to volunteer for extended duty.  The more I helped, I reasoned, the more ingratiated they would be; the more Lazarus would think of me.  Down we went, mother and I, and hauled up the rest of their sad possessions.  I was exhausted and achy.  She asked if I’d like to stay for dinner, but I declined.  She suggested another time, and I was about to say that it wasn’t necessary. I had already spent more time with them than is customary for me, and I was concerned Lazarus was drawing me into something dangerous, for this building and this floor were my home; the attraction was much too close to home.  Then the plink-plink of guitar notes drifted through the air and utterly, completely captivated me.  I recall thinking, “I may be lost.”

I sidled to the doorway and saw Lazarus perched on the clumsy sofa, a big ratty thing that had almost torn my arms from their sockets.  Lazarus was playing a simple song, “London Bridge,” but his determined expression and his Abel face so overwhelmed me that I knew I had to break one of my cardinal rules:  I had to make friends with the mother — to be with Lazarus.  I accepted her invitation for dinner the following Saturday night.  I conditioned my acceptance on Lazarus providing a little after-dinner concert.  He readily agreed, and the mother tossed a glance my way that was more tolerant than enthusiastic over the prospect.  I said Lazarus possessed talent and I greatly looked forward to Saturday evening.

Although I am not a social person, my parents had been.  They stepped out almost every Saturday night before my father found work far from home.  Usually they had dinner at the home of friends, and those friends would occasionally turn up at our house too.  When my parents went to somebody’s house, they took a gift, often a bottle of wine, sometimes flowers.  I can’t imagine how much time and effort my mother devoted to what she called “the social niceties,” though it seemed considerable.  I chaffed at her focus on pleasing others, because I felt it was an excuse for ignoring me.  I didn’t feel this way when Abel was still in the family, since she doted on him and I received some attention as a byproduct.  With Abel’s absence, any pretense of caring about me vanished, and my parents truly entered their neglectful phase.

However, children learn from their parents, good and bad.  I learned you never arrive at a person’s home for an affair without bearing a gift.  I didn’t know whether the mother was a drinker or not.  I took the safe route and bought flowers.  Rarely have I purchased flowers for anyone, not even for Eve, who, regardless of her claims of being an iconoclast, loved bouquets.  I myself love flowers, when they are firmly rooted in the ground, growing and thriving.  I despise them in boxes and vases, and as gifts.  I’m a pragmatic hardhead on this but, after all, picked flowers die in short order.  Better to give something useful, like dishtowels, or bowls, even a broom to keep a person’s abode tidy.  Nonetheless, I purchased a handsome bouquet of wildflowers already in a vase.  I did so as I knew she would love the gift.  While flowers are impractical, woman love them.  My mission was to give her every reason to love and trust me.

She gushed over the flowers, proclaiming I shouldn’t have and that I had already done enough.  I couldn’t disagree with her, but my time with beautiful Eve had taught me women seldom mean what they say.  Demur as much as they like, deep within themselves they expect the type of treatment I extended to Lazarus’ mother, and without it the best I could have hoped for was depressing failure at establishing an essential bond between us. 

I was wrong about the wine.  She was quite an energetic drinker.  She opened a bottle of white wine and offered me a glass.  I am not a drinker of alcohol, a trait that, sadly, proved of little value to my parents, but which has always provided me with certain advantages over ordinary imbibers.  Occasionally, though, I made an exception, like the time I tried to forge a friendship with Abe’s son.  I have truly indulged only once in my life.  It was the first time I was away from home, at college.  Some fellows in my dormitory suggested we go to a movie and afterwards stop for a drink.  I went along.  In those days I was more inclined to make friendships than I am now.  Instead of stopping in a bar and buying a drink, we pulled up to a liquor store where we each purchased what we liked.  Having no experience, I decided on a bottle of Chianti.  I had no idea how it would taste, but I did like the bottle encased in straw.  We drank back in our dormitory, and I have to admit remembering little, if anything, of that night.  The next morning I was prostrate in bed, with a pounding head and a sour stomach, broken glass on the floor.  I didn’t leave my bed until the evening and vowed never again to touch alcohol, never again to place myself into such an untenable position.  I pretty much abide by this rule, slipping from time to time only for a good reason.

Lazarus’ mother served meatloaf with red sauce, mashed potatoes, and green beans.  She cooked very well.  It was one of the best meals I have enjoyed in a long while, though I acknowledge the meat wasn’t particularly good for my health.  Her children comported themselves admirably and cleaned their plates.  She followed up with dessert, ice cream for all, and coffee for me.  I sacrificed and ate the ice cream to be polite.  Since she had opened the wine, she had been working on the bottle.  I did not see her glass less than half-full the entire time, though at the end of the evening I couldn’t tell if she’d drunk more than one glass.

After dinner, Lazarus got his guitar and played his lovely rendition of “London Bridge” for us.  I wanted another tune and I could read in his lustrous eyes that Lazarus was eager to satisfy me.

However, the mother was strict about bedtime.  She sent Lazarus and his sister off around eight, which I found early, especially for my Abel doppelganger.  But I wasn’t the parent, and didn’t think it was my place to remark. 

With the children in bed, and the object of my interest on his way to sleep, I was ready to leave, and I waited a long time for her to show me the door.  Instead, she shocked me by asking if I minded if she opened another bottle.  Honestly, I was appalled.  Here was a woman with two children to care for, who appeared, on the surface, to be a decent mother, preparing to drink herself into oblivion, and expecting me to join in her folly.  I was on the verge of reprimanding her, when I judiciously reined in my temper.  I wasn’t any less perturbed and angry with her, just in control of my emotions, and espying an advantage.  I asked if she had anything besides wine.  And she did, bourbon, and it was exactly the brand my father and mother kept around for guests. 

As I’ve stated, I am not a drinker; but in this case I had a plan, and alcohol was part of it.

She eagerly poured me a bourbon on the rocks, as I requested, recalling how my father prepared drinks for male guests.  When she presented the drink to me, in an inappropriate, tall tumbler imprinted with a flower design, I frowned, playfully I hoped, and claimed to hate drinking alone.  She’d consumed considerable wine, but she hadn’t lost an ounce of her wit, which was why I wanted her imbibing the stronger beverage.  She countered that indeed I was not drinking alone, and held up her wine glass, half full, as proof.  I smiled — at least I hope I did — and told her I meant her wine wasn’t much of a drink.  She shrugged, set down her wine glass, and went to pour herself a bourbon.  She returned with a similar tumbler — her flower design was different — filled to the brim with a lush brown liquid that easily could have been deep brewed ice tea but, which she assured me, was a bourbon with a splash of water.  As we talked, I feigned drinking my bourbon while she worked quickly through hers.  I put the glass to my lips and allowed the bourbon to touch them, but never actually took the liquid into my mouth.  I have to say my lips burned by the time she’d finished her second glass.  I left her on the sofa snoring softly.  I looked in on the little girl and then on Lazarus.  Oh, the sweetness of the boy, the wondrous duplicate of my dear Abel.  Staring down at Lazarus I knew he must be Abel, for he slept just like my lost brother:  on his side, slightly curled, almost fetal.  He breathed deeply, in and out with affirming force, and I could not resist him.  I bent over him and breathed in the scent of his young life, of the youthful spirit of my poor Abel, of the life he had deserved but which was stolen from him by his terrible accident.  I exited the room and the apartment on a cloud of joy that not even The Pinstripes could dissipate, though they tried mightily.

That was a month ago, and during the intervening time, I have gotten to know the family better, and I feel myself becoming quite intimate with them.  The mother, as I’d learned the first night, is a heavy drinker, or seems such to a person like myself who rarely touches alcohol.  Wine is her preferred indulgence, and I keep her well stocked, bringing a bottle by at least twice a week, and certainly each time I visit with her and the children. 

Soon after I began visiting and she had succumbed to her wine, I corralled Lazarus.  There were many, many things I wanted to ask him that I hoped would help me properly evaluate my theory of reincarnated Abel.  I prayed, supplication I don’t usually allow myself as I believe it is useless; but prayed nonetheless that reincarnation wasn’t typical religious hokum.  At first my questions for him were simple:  Did his mother drink herself to sleep often?  Did she sleep through the night?  The young are beautifully guileless, and Lazarus was no exception.  He informed me his mother drank heavily several times a week.  He expanded, relating how worried he was about his mother, how he understood drinking wasn’t good for a person, and she was drinking way too much.  I smiled at him, delighted because he filled me with hope and a wonderful idea.  I confessed that I hadn’t known about his mother’s problem and was consumed by tremendous regret for the wine I brought her.  I pledged to stop, and help heal his mother.  Of course, I promised with my fingers crossed behind my back.

I know this is deceptive, but I really have no choice:  Lazarus, his countenance, latent talent, and his striking similarity to Abel compel me to get close to him.  I want to become as intimate with him as I had been with my own brother.  If the mystics are correct, he could be Abel.  My deception was and continues to be simple:  In addition to seeing the mother with her children, I arrange times to see her when the children are gone.  When we are alone, I bring wine for her, several bottles at a time. 

I certainly do not intend for my relationship with Lazarus’ mother to be anymore than platonic, ever.  I envision us as “girlfriends,” close confidents who can share our innermost thoughts and worries, though I have no intention of telling her mine.  I am and always wish to be a private person.  However, I did not calculate correctly the mother’s neediness.  It is emotional, which I suspected; and it is physical.  Her physical desire revealed itself on our third time together without the children.  She’d consumed half a bottle of chardonnay, her favorite white wine, when she joined me on the sofa.  Sometimes she’d sit with me on the sofa, at the other end, legs curled under herself, leaving a cushion between us.  But not that night.  That night she settled herself next to me and shocked me by using my body as her pillow.

I am excellent at hiding my true emotions.  I made the mistake of being too open with Eve and vowed after she was no longer with me, never to commit such an error again.  It required quite an effort on my part, but I succeeded in containing my surprise. 

Not only did she lean again me but she laid her head on my shoulder, and nuzzled me.  Not knowing what else to do; I put my arm around her, although it was never my intention to lead her on romantically.  I wished only for time with the boy I believed could be Abel.  Over the week, unhappily, the situation between Lazarus’ mother and me has become more critical.  That is, she is in love with me and exhibits expectations.  I am keeping my path clear to my reincarnated Abel and now am forced to lead her on.  I do not look forward to the day I have to reveal the truth to her.

On the bright side, Lazarus and I have become marvelous chums, just as Abel and I had been.  With his mother incapacitated most evenings and weekends, Lazarus, and his sister, look to me for guidance and the small scraps of fun they can snatch from their neglected existence, although I would not be honest if I didn’t report the sister for what she is, a big nuisance.  Her presence makes private conversation with Lazarus difficult.  She intrudes constantly, demanding our attention until it is all I can do to refrain from batting her.  On a few occasions I’ve mentioned my irritation to Lazarus and he has expressed his own frustrations to me regarding her.  His are the usual ones for a little boy, and they probably afflicted me when I was his age.  I sympathized with him, and went further.  I informed him that without a little sister he could have much, much more:  more toys, outings, more gifts at Christmas, and a better birthday party, better than just a cake.  Without the sister — dear as she is, cute as she is, absolutely endearing as she is — his mother would have more time and more money.  More of both for him.

Well, I am delighted to report the prospect of life as a single child thrills the boy.  Naturally, I don’t have the heart to reveal the drawbacks of singlehood for a child.  (There are none for an adult, and I would not forfeit my singlehood for anybody or anything in this world.)  The difference, however, between Lazarus’ childhood and my own is he will have me as his companion.

Many times Lazarus and I converse as he strums his cheap guitar.  He is quite talented and I encourage him.  I have purchased sheet music for him and a book explaining how to read and write music.  He has taken to these gifts and each day improves his musical skills.  I have hinted I might buy a piano for him, if he continues strengthening his skills. 

These times when we are together his mother is either at work or “resting,” having drunk a bottle of wine or several glasses of bourbon.

I think we have an ideal relationship, and I am very glad I decided to help the mother move in.

 

CHAPTER 11:  SARAH

Lazarus’s sister — I’ll call her Sarah — is a darling child.  She’s no more than a toddler, but anyone can see her destiny:  a gorgeous woman, the type men lust after.  And she could grow into a smart woman, too.  She is already bright, very quick on the uptake, with a startling vocabulary for a tyke considering her mother, who is not among the most intelligent of our species, not to mention her proclivity for drink, and how utterly destabilizing such an addiction can be on a family. 

Sarah has demonstrated the high quality of her youthful brilliance to me innumerable times.  I’ll be engaged with Lazarus, perhaps encouraging him to play his guitar, when she appears and claims to know how to play, and strum better than her older brother.  I tolerated her behavior in the beginning.  Truthfully, I was curious.  While Lazarus resisted sharing with Sarah, I implored him to put aside the natural selfishness plaguing all of us, and particularly intense between siblings, and do me the favor of allowing her to satisfy my curiosity.  Such a sweet boy is Lazarus; he complied with my suggestion, requiring no further prodding of any sort, and no ugly threats.  She, not gracious herself, seized the guitar with such ferocity you would have suspected Lazarus of having stolen the instrument from the girl in the first place.

Sarah is a shocking creature.  It is not her antisocial behavior that stuns me, though I’m certain it would disturb anyone as much as it does me; but no, it is her talent, the innate skill she demonstrates.  She reproduces every tune played by Lazarus, and better, at least to my ear.  She has learned the music simply by listening and observing her brother’s fingers move over the guitar strings.  Honestly, I find her freakish, almost as frighteningly abnormal as the boy I think may reside in Lazarus’ body.

Uncanny, too, is how her mother treats her.  To Lazarus’ mother, Sarah is to be the center of the household.  Nothing exemplifies her mother’s doting better than the bathroom, the only one in the apartment.  Using the bathroom is a trial for me for the little room is completely feminized, and worse, girlish in a sickening, immature manner.  The mother has painted the walls pink, an almost vulva shade, deep, overwhelming, and quite troubling.  Cloying water toys line the lip of the bathtub:  floatable ponies, kittens, fish, and the inevitable cliché, a rubber ducky, each in pastel shades, lavender and pink predominating.  The shower curtain features “Hello Kitty.”  The bathmats are pale pink.  The toiletries are girly articles, all fruity flavors like strawberry and grape.  I cannot find anything in the room with masculine sharpness to it.  The bathroom imparts the impression that only women live in the apartment.  It reminds me of my own home done up by my mother to cater to the little king Abel.

Seeing the bathroom and the way the mother focuses her attention on Sarah hurts me, and perturbs me too.  I so empathize with the pain and neglect poor Lazarus suffers.  Often I urge him to express his anguish, but he harbors a certain understandable loyalty to his mother and he refuses to speak of his pain.  Oh, I have no doubt he suffers.  Such a noble fellow, he bears his burden silently, without complaint.  My heart aches for him, for he is so like I had been when Abel enthralled my parents, especially my mother, with his spectacular talents, his sweet face, and his charming demeanor.

I am declaring the elevation of Lazarus to the star position he deserves as my additional mission in the household.  I know my pursuit will compound his pain, but I also know he will be better for this temporarily added anguish. 

Since I cannot conceive of how to conduct my mission without harming someone, without jarring emotions, I guess it is best to operate like a Civil War surgeon performing an amputation:  swiftly. 

It is Sunday afternoon and my resolve is steel.  I’m lounging in the small living room of Lazarus’ apartment.  His mother is in the bedroom, sprawled on her bed, oddly positioned, half covered by a sheet.  She became inebriated early on and is now sleeping away the day.  Her behavior is usual.  What is unusual today is that I treated her to a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, ninety-proof gin, and the strength of all gin distilled in the old days, but not anymore.  She guzzled the liquor as she did her wine, so I know she’ll be out for hours, perhaps straight through the night.  I’ll be gone before dark, before she recovers. 

I suggest Lazarus practice his guitar alone in his room, and that later he treats us, meaning Sarah and me, to a little concert.  He hesitates.  I can’t blame him.  I understand what is behind his slow amble to his room, no larger than a suburban closet.  He watches me intently as I cozy with the resented Sarah.  I see he is disturbed, agitated, but immobile, a boy bound by inertia.  She’s doing it again; she is stealing his due; she is robbing him of me.  He is impelled to stop it, but he is frozen.

I have my arm around the somewhat rebellious Sarah.  I give her the most casual stare I can muster.  I don’t wish to reveal my sense of her, though I find it difficult to restrain myself.  I see her future so clearly — she will monopolize the mother’s time, demand her attention, not with screams and yelps, but with sweetness, unbearable beauty and feigned love.  All the expressions of emotion no mother can resist, emotions all mothers yearn for.  Emotions Lazarus can’t match.  What piddling money the mother may have, she will spend on Sarah.  Though Sarah might be incompetent, despite her genius, lousy in school, terrible in relationships, and a failure, like the mother, in work and every aspect of life, none of this will matter.  Even after Sarah loses every endearing quality, her mother will always see her as her sweet daughter who wants, needs, and appreciates her.  No way can Lazarus counter Sarah’s cunning already emerging in her toddler stage.  I observe it all, and she resists me for she perceives I see to the core of her being.  I comprehend with perfect limpidity who she is and how she will develop.  Why wouldn’t she resist somebody who understands the truth about her, and who might change the course of her mapped life to glory?

I am forced to contort my face and snarl at Lazarus to get on with it.  I do love the boy and I see the best of Abel in him; but for his sake, to save him, I can’t show him my true feeling.  If I do, certainly he will not go to his room, and I will not have the solitude I need to start the hard job of turning Sarah around.  Fortunately for me, he responds and enters his room.  I will express my gratitude to him for making this sacrifice, after I’ve straightened out Sarah.

I wish to be kind to Sarah.  However, she is such a difficult child.  Sometimes I believe I am losing the knack of acting properly around people and I know I have a problem understanding children, though not special children like Lazarus.  But Sarah is a bigger than usual problem for me.  Then I suggest to Sarah that I take her to the local playground and she responds with delightful glee.  I believe I have broken through.

The playground is in a small park a block from the apartment building, and I pass it every day to and from work, and never fail to admire the lushness of this island.  Years ago, I understand, the city government, ever trying to make our city more appealing and livable, planted evergreens in the area that surrounds the playground.  Since, the trees have prospered, now dense as a forest and almost hiding the playground. 

Usually, the playground is empty in the morning, but in the evening I see many children in it.  Their parents wait for them on benches surrounding the play area.  It is Sunday and late in the day.  When we arrive at the playground, it is empty, except for a little boy and his mother.  I urge Sarah, who now is reluctant, into the play area and encourage her to play with the boy.  The boy shows interest in Sarah; and why not, as she is a gorgeous child.  He engages her in play and the mother motions me over and pats the vacant space next to her.  I sit, ready to play the attentive father.

She remarks immediately on Sarah’s beauty and claims to notice the resemblance to me.  I thank her and demur from the compliment, finding it easier to do this than explain Sarah’s actual relationship to me.  The woman blathers on about her son and how timid the little lad is.  She’s delighted we showed up as her son obviously enjoys playing with my daughter.  She probes as to how many children I have and I tell her Sarah is it, the light of my life.  She professes to understand totally as the boy is her only child and the center of her universe as well.  I anticipate her next inquiry and she doesn’t disappoint:  She wonders if there is a Mrs.  I wish to be absolutely truthful on the subject, but realize that if I am, I may never be rid of the woman and her child; for I am conscious I have a magnetic appeal for women.  They want to possess me.  Thus, I lie and say I am married to the best woman a man could want.  I notice she eyes me skeptically, as if marital happiness is beyond her comprehension, and glances at my left hand.  I nonchalantly claim a terrible allergy to gold and silver.  I can’t be sure she entirely believes me.  However, the comment has the correct effect as, within five minutes she says, she must return home.  She rounds up her son and walks in the opposite direction, away from my apartment building.  I would like to follow her as I am curious to know where she lives.  I have a feeling the knowledge might be valuable one day.  But Sarah, in her usual fashion, prevents me. 

Sarah is enjoying herself.  From minute to minute she’s on the slide, the jungle gym, the rocking horse on a spring, and then the swing.  The swing presents a problem for her.  Her legs are short; after all, she is not much more than a toddler.  She can’t propel herself well.  She hasn’t mastered the art of pumping with her legs and pulling up with her arms.  I blame the deficiency on her mother, who would rather wallow in self-pity, pacify herself with a bottle of wine, and escape into bed, or wander off in her stupors to who knows where with whomever, probably the boyfriend from her past.  Anyway, the result of her parental ineptitude is that Sarah cannot swing properly.

Sprightly the entire day, sudden weariness overtakes me.  Perhaps it is because night is approaching and I will again have to confront The Pinstripes.  Then there is the business of Sarah. 

Slowly, I push myself off the bench and walk over to where she is swinging.  I sense the world has slowed down, or I have.  My surroundings have lost a few degrees of sharpness; or maybe it’s me who has dulled.  At the swing, I offer to push Sarah and she responds joyfully.  She squeals and demands I push her high.  I launch her and she rockets up.  I push harder on the return and she arcs higher, and she is happy.  Again I push hard, and again, and again, until she is nearly as high as the top bar.  She’s not joyful any longer though; she is screaming.  She’s shouting, too, and I have difficulty distinguishing her words, until the swing is back in my hands and I’m pushing hard again.  She’s terrified.

I tell myself I should stop; but, honestly, I’m not entirely certain of her situation.  She may be frightened; on the other hand, she did order me to send her high and higher still.  If I stop, I would displease her, and I’ve come to realize Sarah is not a girl to make unhappy.  She can transform my life into a holy hell.  Since I don’t wish this for myself, I give her the hardest shove of the afternoon. 

I watch agape as she climbs, climbs, climbs to the height of the center bar and then loops over the top.  Fortunately, Sarah fiercely clutches the chains.  For a moment I think all will end happily.  I almost allow myself to release my breath, which I have been holding.  Then the true magnitude of what is developing awakens me like thunder to danger.  Too late.  Once over the bar, the swing propels forward so forcefully that Sarah’s young undeveloped muscles can no longer hold on.  Much as I would like, changing the laws of physics is beyond my humble and limited human capability and she pitches off the swing seat, skyward and forward.  Had we been in my backyard of my youth, she would have landed on soft springy grass, doubtless with nothing more than a couple of bruises and a ton of damaged pride.  But we aren’t; we are in a city where they construct a concrete pathway with curbs to and from and around the playground.  To my horror, she lands on the pathway, her head — I see this very distinctly — smashing on the curb.  What a horrible accident.  I should never have allowed her to swing, not after the fate Abel suffered.

You can imagine my panic at the sight of the poor child on the ground.  Seized by terror and concern, I freeze.  I am catatonic, unable to move as much as a digit on my trembling hand.  What immobilizes me is my sense of culpability.  No.  Wait.  I must be truthful, revealing, and honest as possible.  What I fear is that others will view me as irresponsible.  Of course, this is totally groundless.  Sarah is a willful girl.  I know Lazarus will understand, for Sarah has exhibited her willfulness to him on many occasions.  But there are others who will not understand.  They do not know me, and they do not know Sarah.  All they will see is a little girl with her blood dripping on the curb.  Oh, how harsh this must sound, but it is the truth.

After my catatonia dissipates, I scan the playground and the paths leading to it and miraculously see nobody.  Sarah and I are alone.  Naturally, I am elated, though worried because no one witnessed the truth, that I had no hand in the poor child’s end.  But I have a chance to extricate myself, and I take it. 

I’m a neat and anticipatory person.  As such, I always carry a handkerchief with me.  One never knows when such an article will come in handy.  I prefer cloth handkerchiefs to paper tissues because they are more versatile.  Sometimes, for instance, my hands will get wet, and a cloth handkerchief is an excellent substitute for a cotton hand towel.  I think I am among the last people to use handkerchiefs, or at least the last in my cohort.  I feel fortunate having mine with me.  I pull it from my pocket and unfurl it.  I kneel beside the prostrate child and, carefully raising her head, against rationality fearing I might hurt her, band the handkerchief around the wound and knot it.  I lift her and carry her away.

Sundays, I’ve observed, are not busy outdoor days.  Perhaps at the zoo, or the city’s restaurants, people gather; but in residential areas, it is possible to go for a time without seeing anyone, and certainly it is so this Sunday.  I thank the great deity for this as I carry Sarah back to our building.  I assume people are indoors enjoying their Sunday dinners, and the provident watcher caused the frightful accident to take place during mealtime.  It almost makes me want to believe.  Almost.

As I lope with Sarah, who I am holding away from me, I’m thinking very fast; I’m feverish with ideas.  I hold her as a loving father would clutch a playful child.  She has soaked my handkerchief bandage, turning it claret red, so, it seems to me, it resembles a child’s playful and darling headgear.  If I see a person, I am confident I can smile and say my daughter is worn from play and napping in my arms.  Oh, the mess, the mess is nothing.  Her mother will be very unhappy with the mess.  But no, no, it is nothing at all.

Nonetheless, I decide against approaching our building from the familiar route; rather, I choose to enter from the rear through the alley.  It will be best not to see anyone, if I can manage it. 

Entering, I contemplate taking her to her apartment and explaining the terrible tragedy to her mother and Lazarus; but upon consideration I reject my urge at forthrightness.  I fear I will be misunderstood.  How would I react to a friend to whom I have entrusted the safety of my child and my dear sister, returning her to me mortally damaged?  I would blame the friend, even though in my heart I would know it was an accident and the poor friend was suffering as much as I.  The better course, I decide, is to hide Sarah and when she is discovered exhibit the same shock and horror as the mother and Lazarus.

We have a basement in our apartment building, which has access by way of a staircase in the back.  In the basement are small storage cages used by tenants.  I have such a cage, though it is empty, as I am not an accumulator.  The staircase is steep and poorly lighted, just one bare bulb dangling at the base.  It occurs to me as I descend with Sarah in my arms that a child playing on the stairs could easily lose her footing and tumble down.  The consequences could be disastrous.  The child could break her neck.  People often break their necks falling down stairs, I believe.  Or she could fall head over heels down, down, down, and bang her head on the stairs or on the floor or wall at the bottom, much as Sarah cracked her head on the curb at the playground.

At the foot of the staircase, I lay Sarah down.  I stare at her fragile body for a minute, maybe longer.  Time is losing meaning for me; days could be passing, years perhaps, like in “The Time Machine,” the old movie, where the centuries rocketed by in blurs, revealed only on the chronometer on the control panel.  I arrive at a conclusion.  The little girl simply does not appear natural.  She strikes me as what she is:  A lifeless girl lying on the concrete.  She does not appear to be a girl who stumbled on the stairs and plunged sadly to her death. 

I kneel and stroke her hair, which is resilient and soft.  I untie the handkerchief.  Sarah’s blood splotches it, but she did not bleed as much as I feared.  I regard the tragedy of the situation compounded by that fact.  Possibly she did not strike the curb hard, and might have survived with a little bump and a tearful story.  Except, of course, soft or hard, she hit in precisely the manner necessary to guarantee her on-the-spot demise. 

I glance up the staircase where the solution to my dilemma lies at the top.  I gather Sarah into my arms, careful to keep her head away from me and carry her to the top of the staircase.  She is no burden at all.  At the top, I lower her, slip my hands under her armpits, and balance her on her feet.  I bounce her once, then twice.  I cannot help myself, as even now she seems a playful child, a child who should be bouncing.  Then I release her and watch her thump, thump, thump to the bottom of the stairs.  Feeling at ease now, relieved, in no rush, I amble down.  I kneel and examine her.  I stand and study her, the twist in her torso, the splaying of her arms, the manner in which her head rests on the bottom step.  My conclusion: perfection.

 

CHAPTER 12:  NEWS

It is still early evening as I climb the stairs to the ground floor.  The sun shines and I have an hour before darkness, when I must return to my apartment.  I am worn out by the day’s events and worn down by concern over what people will think.  And The Pinstripes will be waiting for me, impatient with me if I am late; and tonight they will be harsh with me for what has transpired.  My only refuge is my apartment, my bed, my covers.

But while I have time before the sun sets, I must appear at Lazarus’ apartment and break the news about Sarah.  I hesitate.  It’s the age-old question confronting me:  How best to convey bad news?  I could burst into the apartment and blurt the news, expressing my deepest sorrow, assuring Lazarus and his mother I did everything possible to protect and save Sarah.  “She just disappeared.  Vanished.  You know how she can be,” I might say.  I could enter and calmly and compassionately reveal the fate of the beloved daughter, the treasured sister (for though she was a hellion how could anybody not forgive her faults and love her, just as I loved my devil, Abel?).  At their door, their door directly in front of me, my hand inches toward the doorbell.  Again, I hesitate.  I am fearful.  I have nothing to fear; nonetheless terror consumes me.  I don’t want to upset Lazarus or the mother.  I love him too much.

The hallway is empty and I take advantage to retreat to my apartment.  Inside, I lower myself onto my sofa.  I feel heavy, which is not surprising considering the burden I am carrying.  How do I explain to these lovely people?  I calm myself by breathing deeply.  I’m a big fan of self-help books.  I have learned much reading them and feel they have improved my health immensely.  Relaxed, I realize I have been formulating a plan but, for some strange reason, it has slipped from my mind.  In my apartment, on my sofa, breathing steadily, peacefully, I now recall it.

I spend a few minutes working through my plan, which is a tiny diversion from the truth, though less painful for all parties, in my opinion. 

Leaving my apartment, I stroll toward theirs, completely confident in the righteousness of my approach.  I knock on the apartment door and the mother answers and lets me enter.  She doesn’t follow me in but stands at the door peering into the hallway.  At the same time, Lazarus emerges from the bedroom he shares with Sarah.  I sense a thrill igniting in me, as I see him look pensively for his sister.  (He is so sensitive, so intuitive.)  While losing a sibling is sad, as I know personally, there’s also joy.  In Lazarus’ case, I’m sure he will be pleased he will no longer have to share a room with his sister, with a girl, with anyone.  He will be free to do as he pleases in his own room. 

The mother returns from the hallway, where she has lingered in search of Sarah, as I suspect from her question:  “Where is my daughter?”  I detect a flicker of fear both in her eyes and in the weak timbre of her voice.  Anger wells in me, up my esophagus, almost out of my mouth, but I check its progress in time.  She’s telling me she doesn’t trust me, already blames me for anything and everything that might have befallen Sarah, though we both know the daughter was a terror fully capable of injuring herself.  The mother infuriates me, tacitly accusing me, thinking I might have acted irresponsibly.  I have a good mind to clam up and let her find her precious daughter on her own.  However, of kind heart, I realize doing so would be too cruel to Lazarus, and so I launch into my explanation.

The mother interrupts me, demanding to know the whereabouts of Sarah.  She is quite crude, a trait I hadn’t fully appreciated in her until this moment.  She demands, “Cut the bullshit!”  Indeed.  Such vulgarity in front of her son is very disappointing.

My dear friend and, I believe, reincarnated brother, Lazarus, stands silent, obviously as shocked as I by his mother’s hysterical antics.  I stare deeply into his beautiful, innocent eyes, laboring to confirm these feelings.  Sometimes children can be quite inscrutable.  People often say the young wear their emotions on their sleeves, but I haven’t found this to be entirely true.  Abel, for instance, was excellent at hiding his true feelings.  He’d screech at some of my behavior, giving our mother the impression he was unhappy with me.  Truth was I delighted the little guy and he pretended otherwise for additional attention.  Lazarus’ demeanor strikes me as similar.  To curry the favor of his mother, and I fully understand why he is obligated to do this as he must live with the woman, he casts concern over his face, producing lines where none ordinarily appear on his pure, flawless countenance.  Of course, she doesn’t realize the true nature of the boy’s troubled expression.

I turn my gaze on the mother and explain how wonderfully Sarah and I played at the playground, how much the girl was enjoying herself.  Then suddenly, too quickly for me though I am an agile person, she bolted from the playground and charged toward home.  I yelled for her to stop; that I was responsible for her well-being; that she should listen to me as she would the mother.  But, I remind the woman, Sarah is a spirited and impetuous child, and she would have none of me spoiling her fun.  She was quick and fleet of foot, and I lost sight of her.  After extreme effort, I had to stop the chase, fearing I might go lame.  Anyway, I tell them, I assumed she was hightailing it for the apartment.  I conclude by professing I am equally surprised and now as worried as the mother by the girl’s absence.  I assuage the concern, anger, and anguish I see battling in the mother by suggesting the three of us search around the apartment house.  Perhaps, I suggest, Lazarus knows where Sarah likes to play.

Lazarus is such a wonderment, such a lovely boy, a tiny genius, because he immediately says that the girl likes to run up and down the stairs, including those leading into the basement.  Incredibly, Sarah also likes to play in the storage cages in the basement.  He reveals she enjoys playing house in one of them, (perhaps mine, I speculate, since it is empty and unlocked).  With huge effort I restrain myself from dropping to my knees before the boy and crushing him with a hug of gratitude.

The mother asks sharply if I thought to check the basement before coming to the apartment; or maybe she’s accusing me of having checked everything, inferring I know more than I am letting on.  She orders us to the basement.  And to tell the truth, I have nearly forgotten what is in the basement.  After all, I am rarely there, as my vacant storage bin attests.

How we follow the mother is quite funny, at least to me, who can visualize Lazarus and me as ducklings waddling behind their mother, off to the pond for a swimming lesson, an essential lesson in survival.  “Not all survive,” I almost giggle aloud!

Then the door to the basement is in front of us and her hand is on the knob twisting.  The door swings open, away from us, and she reaches in with her right hand and pats the wall several times, up high and down low, until she fingers the switch.  In an instant the single bulb casts stark yellow light into the cavern, barely brightening the space, but sufficiently so that we spy a pile of something at the base of the staircase.

It could be anything, the pile.  It is indistinct from where we stand because of the dim light.  Our building super is not the neatest man in the world and many times I have stumbled onto a misplaced garbage can in the front hallway or a mop left forgotten in a corner, or cleaning pails and rags languishing in front of an apartment door.  When I hear the mother sucking in air and expelling it violently, I calmly suggest she not jump to conclusions, citing the unsavory habits of the Super.  Perhaps she hears me, but she doesn’t heed me and rushes down the stairs.  Her bounding frightens me.  What if she stumbles and falls and injures or even kills herself?  What would become of poor orphaned Lazarus?  I certainly would like to care for him; however, I am not the type to parent a child, otherwise I would marry and produce children of my own.  What a litter would spring from my seed!

My worry is needless though; she arrives at the base of the stairs without mishap.  Her instincts prove correct.  The pile that could be mere rags is actually the twisted body of Sarah.  Oddly, I sense from the moment the mother opens the door and sees the pile it would be her; yet I don’t understand how and why I should know this.  Sarah and I were at the playground.  She was having a delightful time.  Then there was a mishap.  And then … what?

She lets out such a howl that anyone in the building napping surely must be aroused.  I arrive at the foot of the stairs with Lazarus trailing me.  I reach for Sarah, whom the mother clutches in her arms with such a ferocious grip that I don’t think I could pry the child from her, even with a crowbar.  From an obligation to help her, I try employing soothing phrases such as “Let me help you,” and “Oh, poor Sarah.  This is such a sad day,” and “She was such a merry child just hours ago.”  As I utter these placations, I am trying to take the child from her, my sole intention to alleviate a portion of her grief in this small way.

The situation is quite awkward as she resists me.  She turns her vulgar nature upon me once again.

“Leave her alone, you bastard!”

It is shocking that she curses me as irresponsible, and accuses me of being at fault, that the death of the poor child is the result of my neglect. 

She chants over and over, “Why did you let her run away?” 

Well, I could launch into a very long and detailed explanation of why, beginning with Sarah’s headstrong and impulsive nature, which, I will have to pointedly remind the mother, is a direct result of her liberal attitude toward the little girl.  I am a sensitive soul, however, and repress the disquisition, and chant my own plea, “Let me help.  Please let me help.”

As I issue my appeal, I reach for Sarah’s limp form, her head lolled against the mother’s chin, her arms hanging and fluttering slightly with each of the mother’s stuttering breaths.  The expression for Sarah’s situation is “rag doll” and the vivacious girl is in exactly the state of an inanimate toy.  The mother jerks the child from my stretched arms and the effect is … well, I don’t wish to appear insensitive as I am heartfelt at the scene and consumed by deep sorrow over the girl’s demise … but the effect is comical.  Sarah’s once energetic legs dance in counterpoint, her arms flail like a distressed swimmer’s, and her head snaps backward until the girl’s lifeless eyes stare blankly at the ceiling.  We, the mother and devoted friend, compound the effect struggling over Sarah’s dead self.

I realize for the sake of the passed Sarah I must be the responsible one and back off, which I do.  My reward is a glare from the mother, who shoves me aside, snatches Lazarus’ hand, yanking him from beside me, and clomps up the stairs.  I stand frozen.  Rejected.  Abused.  I feel wet, too, as sweat moistens my back and prickles my upper lip.  The sense of panic that overtook me at the park returns:  I fear they will blame me for poor Sarah’s death.  It was an accident, pure and simple.  Her death was her own fault, just as Abel’s was his own.  Abel, I remember, is the one who lured me into my current predicament.  And Lazarus too, whom I believe is Abel or holds some part of him.  How unfairly my parents treated me after my brother’s death.  It was like the look in the mother’s eyes, suggesting I was deficient in some regard, like I could have prevented Abel from wandering near the swing seat, as if he was incapable of understanding the consequences of what he was doing; as if Sarah hadn’t demanded to go higher and higher; as if she hadn’t realized higher was dangerous. 

I free myself from my thoughts after how long I don’t know, but more than a minute or two must have passed as the mother, Sarah, and Lazarus are nowhere in sight; nor do I hear footfalls over me suggesting they are returning to their apartment. 

I trudge up the stairs, for as the panic recedes weariness replaces it, and climbing to the top of the stairs requires every ounce of energy I can summon from my depleted body; and, believe me, it isn’t much.  I want to end the day and go to my apartment, especially as it is late.  In fact, as I glance out the entrance doors, I see the day is dimming to dusk and soon — perhaps in less than an hour — it will be night, black tortured night.  I know where I belong after dark.  But I have a little time and decide to knock on Lazarus’ door in the hope of seeing him and ascertaining his condition and attitude about the untimely demise of Sarah. 

Of course, I would rather not confront the mother, so instead of announcing myself with a knock I slyly try the doorknob.  Unfortunately, the mother has retreated into the apartment and locked the door.  I brace myself and knock very strongly, aggressively because that is my emotion now.  I have to knock several times, then resort to pounding, before the door slowly, silently opens.  Standing in front of me is Lazarus and his first action, even before greeting me with a hello and his typically loopy smile, is a finger over his lips.  I am relieved as he is telling me everything I must know:  He is not upset with me.  He still cares for me.  He is signaling me it is best I be quiet.  Every bit of charged concern drains from me and I am grateful to him for his soothing counsel.  I pat his shoulder upon entering the apartment.

Sarah is stretched out on the sofa and the mother is in the kitchen on the phone.  I know I should concentrate on the actions of the mother, but Sarah steals my attention.  I stand over the sofa and gaze upon her.  I marvel at how wonderfully peaceful she appears, almost as if she is at rest.  Her recumbent resplendence brings to mind an exquisite death photo of the type parents of the mid-nineteenth century commissioned to commemorate the short lives of their precious children.  I imagine the scene of Sarah on the sofa in black and white, then in sepia, and I wish I had a camera with me.  I promise myself I will purchase a camera, the self-developing kind.  I am inspired.

With this delightful idea occupying me, I glance up and through the window and notice it is dusk, and perhaps fifteen minutes or less until dark night.  I really must be getting along; however, I desire a moment with the mother to properly express my condolences.  As if she is reading my mind, she finishes her telephone conversation and enters the room.  She gathers Lazarus to her.  She informs me she would like me to return to my apartment. 

“You’ve done more than enough damage,” she says. 

Her words are hurtful but I am understanding, for I know she is in terrible pain.  I commiserate with her by beginning to tell her about Abel, my dear brother, and my agony at his passing.  She glares at me and I leave, turning to toss Lazarus a smile as I exit.

I plan to discuss the matter of Sarah with the mother in the morning.  I certainly would not have retreated now, but it is evening and I have to prepare for bed.

As I am attending to my preparations, starting with the cleansing of myself, particularly important this evening after the long day I have endured, my doorbell rings.  No one rings my bell, ever.  Not since the police visited me; not since Eve left my life; and even then she usually accompanied me to my apartment with no need to knock.  I am in the bathroom staring at my reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, debating with myself whether to ignore or respond to the bell.  I have soap on my face and decide it is better to thoroughly wash and dry.  Perhaps whoever is ringing will give up and go away.

But the ringing persists, loud knocking follows, and a harsh voice announcing I should open immediately as he and his companion are police officers.  Having had previous experience with this ilk of civil servant, I realize I have little choice; the police are rude, powerful, and impatient.  I dry off, slip my Henley on, and trundle to the front door.

I open the door and discover an abundance of activity in the hallway.  Two police officers stand at my threshold, a man and a woman.  Down the hall, Lazarus’ apartment door is open and passing through it are an assortment of people, everyone in a uniform and an official of some sort. 

The male police officer addresses me by my name, which tells me the mother has referred them to me.  They ask if they might have a few minutes of my time.  I dearly want to wish them away, to excuse myself by saying it is important for me to finish cleansing myself and preparing for bed but, I know I can’t indulge myself.  So I say, of course, and invite them in.  It is already dark and I wonder if they will see The Pinstripes; or if The Pinstripes will wait until the police leave, though I know the answer.  I know The Pinstripes will wait, for they never appeared to Eve, who occasionally was in my apartment later in the evening.

I invite them in and offer them seats on the sofa, which they accept.  I sit in the chair and work to contain my fear, for I have taken to hiding a very sharp kitchen knife under the sofa’s seat cushion.  Immediately a princess, adorned with lovely blond hair, materializes in my mind and with her a pea and a stack of mattresses.  The knife is under the woman and I speculate on many things:  the softness of the cushion, the sensitivity of her derriere, and the like. 

Thankfully, she appears oblivious, as the pair launch into asking me what happened, and I relate the incident in detail, duplicating what I told the mother.  However, I don’t embellish on the character of Sarah or discuss what a bane she is to Lazarus.  I don’t wish to tarnish Sarah’s reputation as a sweet little girl.  Besides, I don’t believe they need to know anything more than the facts of the incident, for nothing much happened except a little girl flew too high on a public swing and then lost her grip on the chain.  Then she disappeared.  I searched, but she had vanished.  I would like to add an admonishment to the city; that the city should not construct playgrounds surrounded by concrete curbs.  If not for the curb, poor Sarah would be scampering around her little apartment this very moment.  Ultimately, the city is at fault.  However, wisely, I keep my indignation at the city’s incompetence to myself.  After all, I am speaking to city employees.

They appear content with my description and I am about to rise to escort them to the door when the female police officer inquires about my relationship with Sarah.  I admit this takes me aback.  Honestly, I do not think I have, or had, a relationship with Sarah.  She was just a little girl who lived down the hall who was the sister of a boy who I discern as the possible reincarnation of my brother.  For a moment I am confused and not certain how to answer the female officer’s question.  Finally, I say I have a relationship, a very new and loose one, with the entire family, and proceed to describe how I helped them move in.  After observing their situation, I decided they might benefit from a bit of friendly companionship, especially the mother, who struck me has having a difficult time of it, raising two children on her own.

The female officer listens politely and allows me to finish without interruption.  She follows up by asking if I have established a relationship like this one before, or with anybody else in the building.  I am feeling quite comfortable up to this point with these two friendly people.  They are dressed in normal clothing and I find it difficult to keep in mind they are police officials involved in an investigation.  I have no reason to lie to them, and tell them I am not generally a social individual.  Certainly, I enjoy my fellow man and woman but I prefer to keep to myself.  Life is much less complicated then.  If more citizens were like me, I suppose we would put police officers out of work, I joke.  I earn little smiles from the pair.  They ask if I travel for business or have plans that will take me out of town in the next week or so.  When I reply no, they say good and advise me to keep my calendar clear.

They leave and I sigh with relief.  I am now alone.  I recommence my preparations for bed.  I don’t expect I will sleep well tonight.  Experience prepares me for very active Pinstripes.  I ready myself for bed with greater care than normal; I am donning my full armor of protection.

 

CHAPTER 13:  THE EX

I am in my sleeping attire when the doorbell rings again.  I ignore it and begin to fold down my counterpane.  The doorbell continues to ring, again and again, insistently.  I wonder if the two police officers have returned.  Perhaps they have additional questions for me.  I pause in my task.  I contemplate answering the door.  Doing so, however, will require me to change from my pajamas into my everyday clothing.  Then after speaking with whomever is leaning on my doorbell, I will have to cleanse myself and re-dress in my pajamas and return to preparing my bed.  I groan audibly.  The thought of this becomes such a burden that I freeze on the spot, and I hear grumbling.  The sound is soft, a gentle rattle, but incessant, and I know who is responsible.  The Pinstripes are disturbed; they are anxious; they are waiting to appear and they are perturbed; it is past their time to appear.  I fear the night will be very torturous, more so than normal.  After all, it has been a day similar to a visit with my prized relics — a day with a burst of exquisite pleasure.  Keeping them waiting will serve only to intensify their crowding around my bed, their horrid hovering, their troubling urge to speak to me, to articulate their mantra in words I cannot comprehend.  I really, really must unfold the counterpane and prepare my bed and climb in and secure myself.  I really must.  Yet the doorbell, it won’t stop.  It won’t.  It rings and rings and rings and my head hurts badly, and I am sweating.

I cannot climb into bed in this state, foul and agitated.  As I will have to clean myself and pretty much begin again to ready myself for bed, I slip back into my clothing.  I take but a few moments to change, but the person at my door leaves me believing I have required excessive time, as the unrelenting ringing has morphed into quite disturbing pounding.  The walls to which the door is attached vibrate with the thunderous hammering until I think the studs will crack and my apartment will be permanently damaged.  I am afraid to open the door, for I know it is not the police but a maniac knocking.  Yet, I feel obligated, perhaps by the death of Sarah.  Besides, I am changed anyway.

I unlock the door and slowly open it, revealing a rather large man, tall and ample in the gut.  He has short blond hair, a florid face, and bears an unmistakable resemblance to Lazarus, apart from the hair.  Immediately, he jabs at me with a meaty finger, and accuses me of killing his daughter.  I feel my face contort into alternating tableaus of shock, surprise, and sorrow, deep sorrow, as I truly reflect my emotions on the matter of Sarah’s demise.

I stumble backwards into my living room and he pursues me to the point where I have no alternative but to collapse onto my sofa.  I assure him I did not kill his daughter.  He insists I did.  I deny it, and ask him to use his commonsense.  Wouldn’t the police have dragged me to their station if they had so much as an inkling I had killed her?  At this, he quiets, considers, and then launches into a denunciation centering around my delinquent behavior as her guardian for the afternoon.  Sarah was an impetuous child, and though I did warn her, she chose to operate on her impulses.  She was completely responsible for her own death.  But, under the circumstances, I can’t relate this to her father.  I concede that, perhaps, I should have kept her under closer surveillance. 

During his second tirade, he’s again thrusting his porky finger at me, in my face, bending into me, threatening.  I’m focused on his finger, seeing nothing else but the huge digit.  It is white and knobby and slightly curved, suggesting he broke it sometime, maybe in a situation like this.  The nail is pale yellow.  I wonder if the color indicates a medical condition.  I recall reading that some illnesses manifest themselves in the fingernails, and I hope his might presage an impending heart attack; but no luck there as the finger continues to wag and jab.  The edge of the nail is jagged.  I speculate he might be a laborer, construction, a very rugged individual accustomed to physical exertion and abuse. 

However, I fixate on the white of the finger, for it resembles the larval creatures twisting through The Pinstripes.  I know The Pinstripes are lurking, waiting, anxious, and planning to torture me beyond my endurance later.  In them, wriggling madly are the larvae.  I feel tight, like my organs are expanding and straining against my skin, like my innards will break out and transform me into an inside-out man, a bizarre sci-fi monster.  The finger is alive, an animal, a larvae, the advance guard of The Pinstripes, a horrid creature dispatched to taunt me.  There it is, the gaping red mouth, the mouth like a raw vein, wet, dripping, puckering at me, desiring to latch onto me and drain me. 

I am shaking.  I’m conveying many things to him, and every single one of them is wrong; his conclusions are erroneous.  He is intimidating me.  I am exhibiting the symptoms of a guilty man.  I am a cowering coward.  I am weak.  I am the pervert he wishes me to be.  My predicament is catastrophic.  I must take action.  I must turn this around.

I leap to my feet, straight up and into his raw bratwurst finger, into his larval creature, and my head snaps back to avoid the bloody mouth, and I find myself again seated and demeaned.  He regards me as if I am weird and, worse, weak.  He isn’t allowing me any alternatives and is forcing me to do something I do not wish to do.  My hands push into the cushions of the sofa and they search and search until they discover the object of their wandering, an object hard, sharp, and dangerous.  I have hold of my knife.

As I am securing my grip on the hilt of the knife, the mother appears in my front doorway, left open when the man entered and forced me back into my living room.  She shouts for him to stop his assault and I see him shudder, attempting to shake off her words.  I get the impression he has been in this situation numerous times with her and this might be the reason they are no longer together.  When he doesn’t immediately respond, she shouts again, louder, mixing in vulgarity, demanding he not again demonstrate his well-known crudity to his son.  As if on cue, Lazarus materializes behind her and peeks at us from behind the skirt of her dress.  His small face, at once radiant and afraid and sorrowful, is inspiration and hope to me and I release my grip on the knife.  I smile in a manner I hope suggests his brutish father phases me not in the least.

At the mother’s repeated urging, the man relents and withdraws several steps.  Freedom overwhelms me, elation like a prisoner must feel when he exits prison at the end of his sentence.  I sigh audibly and I lock my eyes with Lazarus’.  In those child eyes I detect compassion for me, as if I am a boy, a disobedient tyke, after a sound, underserved scolding, and he is the brother who had a hand in the act but who went uncaught and unpunished and is now consumed with sympathy and guilt.  I begin to believe the idea:  Perhaps it was Lazarus’ desire that Sarah have an accident so she might be out of the way, so he might be the sole beneficiary of my generous nature.  He’s very like Abel in this:  Abel was never a sharer.  He garnered all my parents’ attention for himself.  Oh, the boy possessed wondrous talents, mesmerizing skills for a tiny tot.  Adults could not help but be enamored of him and his abilities.  But he could never share the adulation, would never attribute anything to me.  He would never, at the least, offer me a bone of praise, like, “But my brother runs faster.  He throws a ball farther.  He soars higher on the swings.”  Zilch.  It was always, always about Abel.  What conceit on the part of this Lazarus!  He must be the reincarnated spirit of Abel.

For how long we connect I don’t know:  seconds, minutes.  Regardless, it is sufficient for the man to sense the intensity of our linking, to see us joining eye to eye, as if a dotted line runs in mid air between us.  Remarkably, he slices at the space between Lazarus and me with his thick hand.  He’s attempting to cut the line, to disconnect us.  He slashes a couple of times, and then turns his attention back to me.  I hear startling, disturbing, and sick accusations fly from his mouth.  They are so vile even the mother, whom I take as no friend of mine, reprimands him.  However, he ignores her and escalates his tirade to such a degree I am scared witless.  I am back on the sofa and am plunging my hand between the cushions and again grasping my defensive weapon, my bastion against his impending battery. 

I can’t determine if she has figured out what might be in my hand, or she simply understands the man is way, way out of line; but she slaps his back hard.  The slaps crack loudly in the room, and maybe the sound of them, more than what little pain they probably inflict, captures his undivided attention.  He swings around to her and everybody — the mother, Lazarus, and me — see he has raised his hand and in a moment will cuff her.  She screams at him and informs us — me in particular, I think — that this is precisely why they are no longer a couple.  Her words hiss like air from a pricked balloon.  He stops, shrivels, and retreats from the room into the hall. 

I wish to thank the mother, to embarrass her with gratitude; but before I can, she points at me to dispel any doubt that she holds me responsible for Sarah’s mortal exit, and assures me I will receive my just desserts.  She leaves and practically drags the man down the hall, and Lazarus trails behind.

 

CHAPTER 14:  BETRAYED

I watch them enter their apartment, the man with them, and as their door closes I shut mine slowly.  I turn back into my apartment and for a moment I stand stock-still and listen … to nothing.  Silence echoes in the room, in every corner, under every piece of furniture, in the spaces within the furniture, inside the walls — everywhere.  I relish the moment, for I have not enjoyed quiet since the dawn of today.  First, there was Sarah and her relentless prattling.  Second, there was the result of Sarah’s untimely demise and the uproar it engendered.  I stand and absorb my reward, my temporary reward, of absolute silence. 

Now I move on to preparing for bed.  The man’s arrival and invasion disturbed me for many reasons, not the least of which is he required me to begin again preparing for bed.  I shower, clean my teeth, ready my bed, slip into it, and secure my bed and myself. 

The Pinstripes appear the minute the sheet settles between my lower lip and my chin.  They rush tonight, like a tidal wave, and I fear they will wash over me, sweep me from my safe bed into their ocean of long faces, suits, and larval creatures; and the big red mouths of these creatures will latch onto every part of my body, regardless that I have shielded every inch of me with my pajamas and my covers.  They will suck every ounce of life from me.  My life will merge with theirs and it will fuel them and The Pinstripes they inhabit, and I will forever travel with them, never finding the peace everybody is entitled to in the end, the peace in which even the likes of Sarah, who kept Lazarus from me, and Adam, who stole Eve from me the night of the holiday party at work, rest. 

Perhaps it is my imagination — after all, it is fertile, but the The Pinstripes appear larger to me tonight.  They are taller; they arch to a greater degree.  And they mumble faster and louder, and, strangely, in a higher pitch than usual; a soprano so sharp and mezzo I hardly associate it with them.  I want to giggle, no shriek, because the scene is comical.  It is extremely funny; quintessential; hilarious.  Big men, huge men, elongated giants, millions of them from my bed to the edge of infinity, all squealing like … well, just like little girls.

I have related earlier how The Pinstripes are horribly jealous beings.  I have a pleasant afternoon among my relics, whether in the meadow or here in the apartment and, in the evening, they are raging with envy.  They simply can’t tolerate it, and therefore cannot allow me to enjoy myself with the innocent pleasure of visitation and contemplation.  I must suffer for each of my pleasures, as St. Sebastian suffered for his beliefs, suffered the piercing arrows.  Between the two of us, I believe he got the better of it; the pain of arrows is finite, after all.

But the reason for The Pinstripes’ assault this evening is different.  They are of a mind, a vicious, collective, pulsating blob of determined gray matter.  They share an endless, convoluted, stringy consciousness that I have committed an abomination.  Oh, such strong and false crap!  Maybe I could accept responsibility for negligence, for taking my eye off a rambunctious little girl.  I suppose I can’t deny that.  If they could articulate their mumblings they would tell me what it is that impels them to torment me:  “It has happened before; this isn’t the first; it must be the last; the consequences will be devastating.”

See what is happening?  I am engaging in conversation, argument actually, with The Pinstripes.  We are battling with words.  Or at least I am.  They are attacking with thoughts and scary, accusatory mumblings.  But this is not what troubles me.  It has occurred before.  I am concerned I might be speaking aloud.  No!  I accept speech.  No!  What I dread is that I am doing what I did years and years ago when The Pinstripes began their visits.  I am shouting.  Worse, I am screaming.  I know my mouth is open.  I feel I am emitting sound.  I can’t hear it.  I can’t hear anything over the din of their ceaseless mumbling.  My throat is raw.  It feels like I’ve just watched a ballgame and I have been cheering passionately for my favorite team.  Or like I’m in a dry room filled with pounding machinery and I am attempting to carry on a conversation with someone.  I have the sense of hoarse, raspy discomfort.  I don’t mind yelling.  But late at night, or maybe by now it is early morning, sound travels.  Sound at night resonates as in an acoustically perfect auditorium.  This terrifies me as I realize others in the building will hear me if I am screaming at The Pinstripes.  If I am disturbing them, anger will seize some of them; and one of them might be enraged sufficiently to take action; and the action they will take is to call the police; and that action will place me in the situation in which I found myself years and years ago. 

I decide it is time I adopt a new tactic with The Pinstripes.  I plead with them to stop their accusations, to quiet their suspicious minds; otherwise I will be carted to a place where they might not be able to reach me.  They must be kinder to me; otherwise they will not have me.  My petition is a mantra, a chant, recited over and over, volume ratcheting higher with each iteration. 

Oh, The Pinstripes are an insensitive gang!  They are giants without mercy in their pretty tailored suits.  They loom and stare and mumble until I know I am screaming.  I am rattling the walls and shaking the very foundation of the apartment building with my agonized screeching.  I realize there is no hope for me, absolutely none.  Nothing is working for me, not even good thoughts, visions of the meadow, of my mother’s hatbox, of the contents, of Abel’s lock, Ruth’s jacket, Eve’s belt; nothing is working for me; nobody is on my side; I am alone.

I hear nothing but my own screams, not even the mumbling of The Pinstripes.  However, I am not surprised when The Pinstripes disperse and I open my eyes, which I have squeezed shut as if tightly snapped eyelids could protect me from assault, and on either side of my bed I see policemen.  There are two males in disheveled, shoddy uniforms.  The one on my right talks into his squawky radio mike fastened to the shoulder of his uniform.  A word or two of what he is saying slips through to me. 

“Nut,” I hear, “fucking nut.” 

These words pain me, but not nearly as much as the next ones, which reach me shortly after “nut”:  “the boy.”

Boy sears me.  It is a wild electric bolt in my head, cooking me, rendering me incoherent, for my sole thought is of Lazarus.  The policemen can only mean Lazarus.  Lazarus has betrayed me.  I could understand the distraught mother directing the police to me.  Though I am completely innocent of Sarah’s end — an innocent bystander would be an appropriate description or, at worst, a mildly negligent overseer — I can understand if the mother referred the police to me because I could clarify the event for them.  In fact, I expect to, though the morning would have been soon enough.  It is not as if Sarah’s situation demands immediate action.  There is no criminal to pursue; it’s just a matter of clearing up a few details, of getting the accident report completed correctly.  I understand the minds of the bureaucrats who run the city.  Dot the I’s and cross the T’s.  I suppose such mentality is necessary when your job is ensuring a well-ordered society.  Yes, the mother calling the police, and even the father, is understandable.  But Lazarus?  The boy and I have something, a connection.  We are like brothers, I believe.  We are brothers, if I am correct and he is the reincarnation of Abel.

It is this thought, drifting through the hot liquid of my brain, which explains Lazarus’ betrayal.  For it is not he, it is Abel.  He is Abel, and it is Abel who like a Judas has handed me over to the police.  I have always suspected Abel held me responsible for his demise on the swings.  Of course, it was his own fault, calling out to me to fly higher and higher regardless of any caution I might offer and getting in the way.  He was such a hardhead.  I could not reason with him, and that day on the swings he was at his worst.  But at other times, too, he was such an unreasonable, selfish little brother.  I am the aggrieved party as he monopolized our mother.  I could never do a thing to win her attention, for with each attempt he would usurp me with his musical talent, his glibness, his neediness, his Machiavellian cunning.  Lazarus didn’t betray me; the poor boy was, and is, Abel’s vessel. 

By the time I arrive at my realization about Abel, a few more people have appeared in my bedroom, now devoid of The Pinstripes but quickly getting crowded nonetheless, and a policeman is asking me, “You understand the rights I’ve just read to you?”  And he is informing me that I am under arrest.  And two of the new people in the room I recognize for what they are, and the sight of them immediately quiets me. 

These people are dressed in blue and they and wear latex gloves and the female of the pair has a stethoscope dangling from her neck.  The male carries a large black case and I know exactly what the case houses.  I don’t want any of them thinking I am a raving lunatic so I go rigid, but, I hope, in a manner full of fresh pink life, and not catatonically, a gray state to which I know I am prone.  Amid the conversations they conduct with the policemen, and the squawking radios emitting earsplitting babel, the man is busy opening the case.  When he has its contents displayed, the female reaches in.  She fiddles in the maw of the case, but I know her game.  I cannot budge, not one iota, less she deduces from my movements that I am a loon.  Time passes, maybe just a minute, but maybe an hour, after which she withdraws her hand and in it has materialized a hypodermic needle.  When I see it, I scream.  I don’t want to scream.  I try mightily to hold in my terror.  I scream and I feel myself thrash.  The three men restrain me.  I don’t even feel the prick as she stabs me, and I descend into a deep, empty sleep.

* * *

I open my eyes.  I am snug under a tightly drawn sheet and thin counterpane.  My arms should be under the sheets, and the counterpane should be thicker and heavier, I think, but the tension is just right, nearly as good as my own.  My coverings are bright white, as is the room.  It is a small room, really not much larger than the modern suburban closet.  It’s sparsely furnished with a night table; white enameled metal anchored to the floor, with wood grain Formica top, two drawers.  A lamp is over the bed and attached flush to the wall.  There is the bed on which I lie.  There is me.  There is a window, tall and slim.  A diagonally crisscross grate is over it.  It is painted white.  Sun streams through the window and the grate and falls across the floor and the foot of the bed and it is very pleasant.  The room is amazingly quiet, as if this room is of itself, detached from everything and alone in a field far, far from the city.  But, of course, I know exactly what it is and where I am.  I think closing my eyes and napping would be nice; but I know I can’t.  I simply cannot.

A woman enters the room after a while.  She’s attired as if her next stop is a softball game and she is the pitcher.  I see beyond the disguise; I know she is a nurse.  She takes my temperature and asks if I slept well.  Silly woman!  I can’t respond with the stick in my mouth.  When she removes it, I say “delightful,” and it’s true:  I haven’t slept as soundly and awakened as refreshed since I can remember.  I do not relate this, however.  Revealing my satisfactory sleep, other than a perfunctory expression of delight, would expose too much of me to her.  She would begin thinking, judging, evaluating; it’s what they do in the place where I am.  I am in a hospital.  I am in the psychiatric wing.  And soon, no doubt, the physiatrist will appear.  I’m familiar with how it works.

The nurse cuffs my arm and measures my blood pressure.  I tell her, “Delightful; my sleep was delightful.”  She smiles.  She probably doesn’t hear that often, not in here.  I smile back.  She says I have excellent pressure.  I intensify my smile and tell her, “I know; I am blessed that way.”  She informs me breakfast is on its way and asks if I am hungry.  I respond I am famished.  And it’s true, as I haven’t had a morsel since my last breakfast, which might have been yesterday morning, or a day or week ago. 

She leaves and the door doesn’t close entirely before a dietary worker enters with my tray.  She’s large and black and I don’t require a sphygmomanometer to determine she suffers from horrible high blood pressure.  I feel superior, as I am in tiptop health, and then guilty for lording my good fortune over the poor woman.  I give her a smile as she sets the tray on the table and rolls my meal in front of me.  She smiles back at me.  She laughs, expressing joy about the weather, as she elevates me so I’m in position to eat my breakfast.  I’m smiling all the time because it is my only option.  I have little alternative in the countenance repertoire.

She leaves and I assess my breakfast tray.  Coffee, lukewarm, a plate of scrambled eggs (suspect powdered), strip of bacon, and home fries, two slices of toasted bread on another plate, a small cup of orange juice.  I drink the juice and pass on the rest.  My diet is healthier than the hospital’s.

Several minutes tick by and then a man and woman enter the room.  They wear white smocks with the hospital’s name and logo stitched over their hearts.  Nametags are clipped to their lapels.  The man carries a clipboard, which he and the woman study for a moment.  When they finish, they look up at me.  They wish me a good morning.  Observing I’ve not touched my meal, except for the orange juice, the man commiserates by admitting to dislike the hospital’s food.  We all smile.  He takes a control device from behind the bed and he lowers the bed until I am nearly supine.  As he does this, he says, “Seeing that you aren’t eating, let’s make you more comfortable.”  I doubt my position has anything to do with my comfort, but I keep the observation to myself.  After he finishes, he asks how I am feeling.  I reply I’m fine and looking forward to leaving the hospital and enjoying the day. 

The woman chimes in, asking if I understand what had happened last night.  I explain as clearly as possible that I was extremely distraught, as I’d accepted responsibility for the accident to my friend’s daughter.  I’d escorted her to the playground near our apartment house.  I’d watched her play, such a beautiful little girl, so full of life, playing so wonderfully.  I’d helped her on the swing and pushed her, at her request, higher and higher, providing her thrill upon thrill.  It was a joyful afternoon.  But it was tiring.  I ask whether either doctor have children.  Both do.  I nod, my gesture communicating understanding regarding the exhausting nature of keeping pace with kids.  I explain how I had turned away from her and walked to the playground bench to rest.

I praise Sarah for her beauty and her delightfully expressive and independent personality.  However, they, as parents and professionals, must recognize the challenges of such a child.  Sarah, I explain, was often difficult.  She was headstrong, whereas her brother was compliant.  He struck the best balance of independence and obedience.  Had Sarah been more like him, she probably would be with us at this moment — and my distress I would not have caused me to become unhinged to the point of hospitalization.

They nod.  I stare at them for a while, attempting to discern their reactions to my tale.  They are worse than stone-faced; they disguise themselves behind happy faces.  I sigh and decide it is best to continue.

Once I settled on the bench, I tell them, Sarah vanished.  Well, at the time, vanished wasn’t what I was thinking.  I knew her and figured she’d scampered off to a part of the playground not visible to me.  I suspected she saw a child and was off to make a new friend and play.  Sarah was an outgoing child, not afraid to approach a contemporary, or an adult for that matter.  This propensity, at the time, concerned me, for it was entirely possible she had encountered a molester.  Molesters seemed to be lurking everywhere these days, and nobody was above suspicion, not even the sweet young mothers I would occasionally see strolling by the playground with their children in tow.  I scared myself and jumped off the bench immediately.  Obsession with finding Sarah possessed me almost as if it was a physical being, a prodding mother reminding me of what is right.  I circled the playground, not alarmed at first, but panicked upon completing my search.  She was not in the playground and after scanning down the street I could tell she was nowhere in the vicinity.

I stare at the doctors as I talk.  They have been cool to me up until now, keeping their distance, hiding any emotions they might be having for me, for Sarah, for my story, behind dispassionate medical expressions.  But the predicament I described of panic over the sudden disappearance of Sarah has done the trick with the woman.  Not for the male, he remains a statue of cold reserve.  But the female, she reacts by raising her eyebrows and widening her eyes, not much, but enough for me to see my plight is affecting her.  I have the urge to smile with gratitude, but I suppress it for fear it might be misinterpreted.

I continue, explaining that I was petrified.  These days children face so many dangers.  I read the papers.  Well, actually I glance at the headlines.  It’s sufficient to understand the dangers.  The normal ones are bad enough, accidents and the sort.  But others, like predators, abusers, sexual perverts — what abominations!  Sarah could have fallen victim to any of these.  Then again, I tell the doctors, she could have simply been Sarah:  completely self-centered, concerned with satisfying her own desires, inconsiderate of others — her mother, her brother, and her caring guardian.  Regaining reason at the time, I suspected that her character was the cause of her disappearance. 

I decided to leave the park area and headed back to the apartment building, figuring she decided she was bored with the park and wanted to go home and play with her toys, of which she had many.  She loved dolls, especially baby dolls.  She played mother constantly.  Obviously she regarded motherhood as her vocation and she earnestly prepared herself for her life’s role.  I smile at the female doctor as I relate this, hoping she appreciates that I am an understanding and prescient individual who is filled with love for Sarah and heartbreak over her careless demise.  But I am holding back a bit, for in my opinion Sarah surely would have failed as a mother.  Perhaps her untimely death was for the best as it saved her from depressing disappointment in adulthood.

Continuing, I tell them I returned to the apartment building.  When I entered, my intention was to go to her apartment and check if she had returned.  However, in the hallway, I decided I’d peek in the basement first.  Why the basement occurred to me, I can only guess.  I suppose it was because I knew she sometimes took a few dolls into the basement and used an empty storage bin as her house.  There are a few empty bins.  Mine is empty.  I’m not much of a materialist.  I’d describe myself as a minimalist.  Less is more is the core of my philosophy.  Well, the rest doesn’t need telling.  I found her dead.  A horrible accident.

Now I see the male doctor react.  He raises the corners of his mouth in something like a smile, but he’s not conveying pleasure, at least not with my story.  No, he’s sneering.  He’s expressing satisfaction with himself, as what I have said seems to confirm something he believes.  He turns to the female.  Her face is kinder, and I can see she is much more supportive of me.  But then she is nodding, affirming whatever it is he has concluded.

Hastily, I speak up.  I just want to add, I tell the doctors, that if she had been a less independent child, if her mother had disciplined her a bit more, if she had been the type of little girl who heeded her guardians, she’d be alive today.  I am firmly convinced we’d — I mean her, her mother, her brother, and me — we’d be in her apartment and she would, in her delightful little manner, be recounting our glorious day together.  Really, it was a wonderful time up until she disappeared.  We were almost like father and daughter. 

The doctors turn and walk away.  As they do, they whisper to each other.  I hear bits of what they say to each other.  The male uses the word “delusional.”  The female says, “Yes, it was the mother.”

CHAPTER 15:  MEDICOS

After this testament and in light of their reaction, I seal my lips.  I believe I have told them everything they need to know.  But, having had experience with medicos, I understand my tight, well-narrated accounting might not, in itself, satisfy them.  I know already they are misconstruing, and they will want to probe, with the hope of uncovering hidden meaning in actions and the manner in which I related them.  I’d decided not to eat my breakfast before I gave my accounting.  It wasn’t appealing, but even if it was I would not have consumed it as I am not at ease talking while eating.  I have a nasty habit of biting my tongue, doubly painful:  at the time of the incident and later when the soreness sets in.  I avoid these consequences by not talking while eating.  What I do is take a bit of food into my mouth.  I chew the food thoroughly and then I swallow it.  Only after it has slid completely down my throat and is resting harmlessly in my stomach, only then do I speak.  The drawback is dispensing information of any length or complexity requires considerable time, for which many people lack patience, including professionals I’m afraid.

So, as I lie in silence, the doctors retreat to the edge of the room near the door.  There they stand very close to each other and alternate leaning their heads into each other.  They are whispering.  Doubtless, they are whispering about me.  I suspect a conspiracy.  I don’t mean a full blown, political style conspiracy like in Libra or suspected in Lincoln’s assassination.  However, they certainly are planning something for me.

I should sit up, but I can’t.  I sense if I do, something will happen.  I’m not sure what it might be; however, I do not believe it will be beneficial to me.  Perhaps it’s simply I’m developing a nasty stomachache from not eating.  Or it may be the startling fact that The Pinstripes did not appear last night.  Mulling their absence, I cannot recall the last time I’ve spent a night without them.  I don’t miss them.  I dread them, for their return will be most disturbing and painful.  Too, it might be they don’t appear because of where I am, in a hospital in a prison in a ward for the insane.  I’m here for no other reason than I behaved a bit too emotionally for the taste of the policemen who called on me last night.  I have discovered over the years that officials do not react well to people in emotional states.  They feel endangered and regard the displays as a prelude to a crime against them.  I appreciate their caution.  I suppose in their position I would conclude the same. 

Any of this could be causing me to view my situation, and the people in the room with me, in a different light.  These so-called doctors in white lab coats are not who I first thought them to be.  And now they are distant from me, partly hidden in the shadowy shroud of the doorway.  From where I lie, I cannot see their faces.  Already I have forgotten what they look like, even the color of their hair.  I’m beginning to think maybe they aren’t like me, or like anybody I remember walking around outside this place; not even like the policemen and the paramedics who are responsible for my presence here. 

I lie very still.  I don’t want a false move to telegraph any of my suspicions or feelings.  I really can’t risk calculating and exhibiting an expression, either, as I might choose the wrong countenance.  I am convinced they aren’t whom I thought.  I believe they are, in some way I can’t grasp at the moment, agents of The Pinstripes.  It’s their faces, the faces disguised in the shadows of the room; those faces want to tell me something. 

I’m frozen and staring and I know staring is wrong, very wrong, for it is the tip off that I’m on to them.  Despite their best efforts, and they are astonishingly deceptive, I am not fooled. 

And then the fright and relief of seeing through their ruse, of figuring them out overwhelms me.  The woman steps into the light.  She is normal.  Almost.  Almost.  But for her face.  Her face is different than it was.  Her face is long, stretched as if seized by crown and chin and yanked extremely hard.  Something else, too:  She appears taller than I remember her from not more than moments ago.  Unless I am wrong, she has transformed in a matter of minutes.  Or maybe she was always like this and I didn’t notice, or I was deceived.  She is a woman, though, still a woman.  But there is no mistaking; she is a Pinstripe of a sort unfamiliar to me.

I am staring at proof that The Pinstripes are real.  I suppose I’ve never doubted they are more than mere mental constructions.  Years ago the psychiatrist pronounced my visions fabrications of my mind.  I never revealed the exact nature of these visions, never described my visitors to him; instead, I made vague reference to seeing shadows moving in the dark.  He implied I was a paranoid, afraid not of nothing but of everything.  He spent lots of time probing what I did for a living, where I resided, how I spent my leisure.  From his survey of my life, he concluded I had a phobia about embarrassment, of committing errors, of people realizing I wasn’t a bright individual — not quite a dolt but not of their caliber.  I avoided everything as a result.  The psychiatrist also said that, actually possessing intelligence, I myself realized subconsciously that I could not avoid what I feared.  In the dark of night, in the quiet of my apartment, where my defense was weakest I imagined the world penetrating.  The assault manifested in the form of indistinct intruders.  I couldn’t describe them, put form to or a face on the invaders, because they weren’t real; they were mere figments of my mind.

I admit I took some comfort in the psychiatrist’s diagnosis.  I implemented some of his suggestions immediately after the sessions had begun, but to no effect.  I had hope, though:  I hoped mightily.  I wanted The Pinstripes to be simple constructs of my mind.  But I knew, deep in me, they weren’t.  And now, before my very eyes, I have confirmation they are real, proof in the form of their physical representatives attending to me in broad daylight.

I stare intensely at them like a science fiction probe, an invisible ray you can’t see but can sense.  And they feel me.  They tingle with the heat of my ray eyes burning into them, fearful perhaps I’m fathoming the plan they are surely hatching against me.  Both look up simultaneously, and I know I am affecting them.  The man whispers to the woman and then strolls to my bed.  As he draws closer, I see what he is, what is hiding under the mask of normal.  It is the face of a Pinstripe; of this I have no doubt.  But for the sake of certainty — for I am not the type to cast scornful arrows wrongly — I crank my body over as much as I am able, confined as I am by the tight counterpane from my waist down.  I am attempting to glimpse the clothing protruding from under the coat.  Unfortunately, I am pinned to the bed more tightly than I first thought and to such a degree I cannot budge the covers, not one iota. 

He is upon me before I am able to discern anything about his attire.  His hands are on me, on my shoulders, urging me back, doubtless to protect his deception.  With pleasant words and tone, he cautions me to be careful, not strain myself, not to struggle against the restraints, as doing so will certainly injure me, and they wish me no harm.  I believe I could be hurt, but I am not tricked into believing he truly cares for me.  He wants something from me, and he’s collecting for The Pinstripes.

I recline under his hand and as I do I realize I am strapped to the bed.  Why I hadn’t noticed this earlier I can’t say.  I was happy, perhaps, for the snugness, for the security afforded by tightly drawn bedding; my pleasure and joy fogged my usually sharp powers of observation.  I am in restraints.  I test them by trying to fan my legs only to discover I cannot pull them apart.  My legs are strapped together at my calves and also at my thighs.  I attempt lifting myself from the bed, pushing against the palm of the Pinstripe doctor’s hand.  Pushing back against my waist I feel a strap.  I slide a hand under the covers and touch it.  It is broad, thick, rough leather and stretches across my hips. 

I lie back and blink.  My breath comes quick and ragged.  In a moment, I am gasping and I am clasping my hands.  They are moist.  My chest is hot and prickled with sweat.  I close my eyes and I feel them flit back and forth under the lids.  I am in full-blown panic.  The doctor settles a hand on my shoulder and informs me the restraints are for my own protection.  I shouldn’t upset myself over them.  He cautions me to calm myself or he will have to sedate me.  He wants to avoid inducing calmness, as there are a couple of gentlemen who wish to speak with me.  I react badly to this information by bucking up, bouncing, struggling.  I lash at him with my hands and words fly from my mouth, though I can’t understand any of them.  The doctor steps back.  I see his movement as I am now opening and closing my eyes and the room and he appear in strobe effect.  He commands the assistance of the other doctor.

I can’t see her.  I can’t see much of anything.  The blinking forces my eyes to water, and the lachrymal fluid refracts the light and images in such a severe way that everything is rapidly blurring and I’m becoming disoriented.  Hopelessly and painfully I buck against my restraints.  But I can hear her.  She is wearing heels and the floor is polished tile and she clicks, and her clicks grow louder and faster the closer she comes.  They cease entirely when she is next to her Pinstripe doctor colleague.  I hear soft whispers and the muted tinkling of glass and instantly I realize what they are up to.  I intensify my struggle, flailing my arms madly, but to no avail.  They get me where I can’t reach, in my strapped and unprotected thigh.  When the needle plunges into the meat of me, I scream as if they are taking a scalpel to me. 

I’m a prim, decorous person.  However, in the presence of two people who are disguised as medical helpers but who, in reality, are vicious haunters, or the minions of these evil souls, you cast aside your natural equanimity and let loose.  I swear up a blue storm, call forth every defamation I know, every disgusting sexual and alimentary process and product, all to no good purpose.  For within a minute, perhaps even less time, my eyelids still and slide over my eyes, and then all is black and dead quiet.

 

CHAPTER 16:  NIGHTMARE

The medicos are up to something, but I am aware of nothing as I am in a void.  Medicos will tell you that while under anesthesia, you are aware of nothing and you feel nothing.  Perhaps this is true for some.  However, oblivion is not my state, for I am fully and frighteningly aware that I am in a void.  I am a blind man, a deaf man, a weightless man, a man without references.  I am drifting up and down, side to side.  I can grab onto nothing because there is nothing but vast emptiness.  My terror is that I am aware of the nothingness.  I wonder if my experience is similar to death, or perhaps it is death itself and I am in a way station, a celestial waiting room, on the verge of the great afterlife adventure. 

Yet, I don’t feel good about the experience.  I am filled with dread, for I know I am in the ultimate incubator of The Pinstripes.  I expect them to appear any moment, and I am absolutely defenseless.  My bed is vanished.  My carefully arranged and drawn covers are gone.  All the barriers I use to protect myself from The Pinstripes are stripped from me.  My face is wet now.  It is saturated.  The wetness cascades down my cheeks.  I am crying.  No, I am drenching myself in sweat produced by stark terror.  I am in a state of dreaded anticipation.  When they come, and I have no doubt they will, what will I do?  They will be upon me.  They will swarm over me.  They will not simply stand and loom over me.  They will be on me and under me, able to touch me.  And they will touch me.  I will be within reach of the horrid larvae that wriggle tunnels through their perfectly tailored suits.  These pale beasts will attack me and infect me, with what I am not sure.  Whatever has been the intent of The Pinstripes these many years, they will fulfill it.  I am at their mercy.  I am helpless.

As fear storms in my mind, an image starts to coalesce in the void.  I am convinced it is the vanguard of The Pinstripes.  While thousands upon thousands congregated around my apartment bed, in the beginning there was one; geometric progression followed.  I am thinking it must be the same way here in the void.  But as the image forms, I see the silhouette does not resemble a Pinstripe.  The shape is female.  Could female Pinstripes exist?  Isn’t the female doctor one of them, or at least a minion representative?  I have no reason to drop my guard, no matter how inconsequential my defense may be.  But as the shape reaches full form, it looks familiar, and it is the figure’s Guinevere belt that gives it away.  Only one woman in my life has worn a belt in this manner.  I fill with elation.  It is Eve returning to me, back to rescue me, as my savior.

She is beautiful, more intensely so than ever.  She is radiant; she radiates life, which strikes me as ironic knowing what I know.  She comes to me in her own nimbus, a saintly vision.  She floats toward me.  Here, I discover, I am as I am — was? — in life:  a being who lives behind his eyes; a creature who only truly exists in his mind, cable of seeing his physical self in the reflection of mirrors, in eyes, in expiring eyes.  Her arms stroke in smooth rhythm like the movement of a swimmer’s arms rising, falling and pulling gently in calm water.  The sight of her releases my tension and peacefulness suffuses me.  I could close my eyes and sleep, but, of course, I must pay attention to her.  She compels me with her beauty and the opportunity to hear her, touch her, hold her, and kiss her once again, an opportunity I believed eternally lost.  She glides to me slowly and the anticipation of her arrival is agony, but oh so sweet.  A luscious pain without hurt; all pleasure.  The relic of her, the belt I possess, hangs deliciously from her hips, descends between her legs, undulates with her movement, and resurrects memories of hours on my bed feeling the leather, rubbing it against my face.  My desire to touch it on her is overpowering.  On her it will possess what I can only wish for from the relic itself:  It will be infused with the warmth of her body, the vitality of her life.  My fingers move involuntarily, my thumbs and index fingers slide over each other in anticipation.  I want her to advance faster and I wish her to continue slowly. 

Now she is closer and I can distinguish the exciting details of her:  her lustrous black hair, her red lips, her lean body, her black dress and the subtle pinstripe in the fabric.  I stare at the dress and fasten on the pinstripes.  It is not as if I am seeing the nearly invisible chalk lines for the first time. 

Now, however, the situation is different.  The Pinstripes are attempting to infiltrate me.  The ersatz doctors are The Pinstripes; or they are at least puppets of my tormentors.  And now my most prized relationship, the woman whom I believe I loved — love — whom I believe loved me but who betrayed me, this woman is an agent of my nightly visitors, my fearsome and feared enemies. 

Oh! but I cannot accept the idea that she is against me, that she is operating under her own will.  In a flash of realization, I understand what is transpiring, and what happened those many years ago.  Eve did not betray me with Adam.  Somehow, by her presence in my apartment, sitting on my sofa, eating at my tiny kitchen table, and, yes, lying with me in my bed several times, The Pinstripes gained possession of her.  Her pinstripe dress is their brand, their notice of ownership. 

I am rummaging the recesses of my mind for the image of Eve when I first met her, invited her to my apartment and the first time she joined me in my bed.  (Not at night mind you, but in the bright light of afternoon.  For never could I have a woman in a bed around which thousands and thousands of despicable spectators crowd.)  My memories, I am discovering, are fantasies, insubstantial wisps of excrement belonging to the bacteria swimming in the folds of my gray matter; they are impure and indistinct.  Was her dress pure black, unblemished black, the black testifying to her free woman status?  It’s all so fuzzy.  But I am exerting because this is important:  Am I just imagining the fine chalk striping?

My effort pays off and I am able to focus on her sharply.  What I see intensifies my fright.  I am right about the stripes.  And I am right about her being their tool.  Her presence before me, in my mind, cannot be good news for me.

I suppose a mind addled by the medicos’ drugs cannot contain two thoughts simultaneously.  I lose sight of her for how long?  A millisecond.  She is upon me, in front of me.  She is inches from me and our faces almost are touching.  I can see the sheen accounting for the sparkle in her eyes.  I can smell the sweetness of her skin, a cloying fragrance like the first minutes of putrefying death.  I see the fine lines variegating her lips, see them though her bright red lipstick.  I feel her soft breath wafting on me and smell its fresh mint.  Her lips are moving, forcing her breath at me, and I believe she is speaking to me, but I can hear nothing.  It is as if she is mouthing a speech and I must interpret her wordless oration.  I concentrate.  However, making sense of it is difficult, as I cannot read lips. 

I try harder though, as I recognize urgency in her eyes.  Eve was always a woman with an expressive face, always able to convey desire, repulsion, sorrow, and other reactions by coordinating her eyes and lips, her forehead and the tilt of her head.  I was always able to read her.  Numerous times that she told me my ability to understand her without words was a trait she admired; it was a trait that attracted her to me and compelled her to return to me, even when she knew she should not.  I should be able to read her now.  Yet, I can’t.  Perhaps she is too close to me and I can’t take in the entire picture properly.  If she retreated a couple of paces perhaps I could resurrect my endearing ability to understand her. 

Or there might be something else at work here, something within me, a type of defensive amnesia.  It may be I don’t wish to know what she is saying.  I have a sense that I do not want to understand it as a way of avoiding the message.  It has to do with The Pinstripes, and with betrayal.

I need to flee her, but I can’t, for though I am unbound, uncovered, exposed, I am immobile.  She can float in any direction; I, however, cannot.  I can, though, swivel my eyes.  At first, I transfer my gaze slowly from the right to the left of her face.  But she is perpetually in front of me and it is impossible to escape her flapping lips and wet eyes.  Minutes upon minutes pass.  Who can attest to the exact time in this fantastical world?  After a long while my eyes ache from the constant and useless shifting.  Then, when I am ready to close them, to fall asleep, I glimpse a figure behind Eve.  The figure is in the distance and I cannot bring it into clear focus. 

In a few seconds, as I dart my eyes from side to side, I see the figure is advancing toward us.  The figure walks, no, the figure glides, but purposefully, as if it understands what is transpiring between Eve and me and comprehends my former lover is now in the camp of my intractable enemies. 

I continue darting my eyes back and forth and staring and darting and dodging contact, when I recognize the figure as a woman.  Why do The Pinstripes believe I am a man easily undone and deceived by females?  First the doctor or assistant.  Then Eve.  Now … who?  Women grasp the truth:  Women wish to dominate me.  They have dominated me.  They do dominate me.

I answer the question before I discern the face of the woman.  She is dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, almost white from this distance, but certainly light gray.  I recognize its cut before I do the person wearing it.  It is Ruth.  She is clothed in one of the suits I remember from church, the short jacket and cigarette skirt that mesmerized me; the suit I removed from her closet and held and touched against the skin of my face; that I smelled and imagined her in.  Now, though, I notice something different, disturbingly discordant in her attire:  Running vertically are faint stripes.  Not actually stripes but some sort of contrast weave that presents itself as fine, silvery stripes.  Could it be Ruth is like Eve, like the female doctor who is probably hovering over my unconscious self?  Is Ruth also a Pinstripe, an agent of The Pinstripes, another love who has turned coat on me?  I want to moan.  I want to ask her, “Ruth, are you with me or against me?  Are you my enemy?  Why, oh why are you against me?”  I can think these questions, but I cannot form them; I cannot articulate them as words and speak them in this strange world.

Ruth, like Eve, moves without walking; she floats; she’s ethereal.  Yet, like Eve, she is substantive.  I believe I know they are in my mind, but I feel they are real; they are agents, and they can harm me. 

Ruth floats next to Eve and the two of them suspend their deadly beauty before me.  They excite me.  I have known both of these women in the most eternal way and my moments with them run through my mind.  Strange how I can fill my mind with so much.  I can watch them and worry over their intentions, and I can remember and honor them as my conquests. 

Black and blond. 

Blond and black. 

True the two.

If my end is at hand, I cannot wish for a better exit.  I might discover myself gliding through eternity with Eve and Ruth hovering with me.  We would be as we are now, three bodies in proximity, but none touching.  I would remain as I am, frozen, stiff, immobile, flushed with desire but flaccid, as if wounded in war.  And I would be happy.  Deliriously, ridiculously elated to be within the radius of their heat; to smell their scents; to feel the ache of anticipation through eternity.  If this is to be my torture, my punishment, The Pinstripes’ conception of inhuman cruelty, then I vote in favor.  At last, I find myself in, and the center of, the perfect, the ultimate, the supremely exquisite ménage á trois.

How long do I cherish the fantasy?  Seconds, minutes, hours?  Time is meaningless in the hell of The Pinstripes, and all minutes are the same.  I believe heaven or hell will be like this:  just the moment for eternity, the moment and nothing else before it, or after it.  Oh, but I am nearly settled in, offering myself up to my larvae-ridden torments, when the distant void quavers and there materializes a pinprick.  It is almost undetectable; yet it disturbs and distracts me.  I wish to lament, to plead for my dear women to forgive me for shifting my attention from them, but I sense danger.  I want to scream danger but my mouth will not budge.

I have had dreams like this before, when I can sleep, when I can dream.  Sometimes I am driving, though in life I drive little, relying on the wonderful transportation system provided by my city.  However, in the dream I am in total control, driving a car.  In the dream, it is my own car and I am cruising down a highway.   It is dark, but I am fearless and relaxed.  Suddenly, I lose control of the car and I begin to veer from my lane.  I struggle with the steering wheel and redirect the car into the proper lane.  But I am traveling much too fast, and from nowhere traffic appears, and I find myself surrounded by other cars, including a car in front of me.  The car in front is traveling much slower than I am and I know I must brake or I will rear-end it.  I think, “Press down on the brake pedal.”  I think, “Transfer your foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal.”  I think real hard in my mind about this maneuver, and I command my foot to move.  It doesn’t.  I sense myself trying and trying to move my leg and my foot, but I can’t budge them.  Oddly, I feel the sensation of movement but there is none.  I try and try.  Panic grips me.  I want to thrash, but I can’t.  I am paralyzed.  It is not fright.  It is actual paralysis, as if I have been stricken.  I never hit the car though.  I always awake at the fateful moment in a drenching sweat.

This is exactly my sensation now observing the pinprick approaching, enlarging as it advances.  I understand the pinprick represents danger, perhaps my end.  In my mind, I am moving back, back, back; but I am not moving.  I am immobile, like my leg in my car dream, unable to avoid disaster.

I tell myself to calm down; this is only a dream.  I’ll wake and be healed and leave the hospital and life will return to normal.

And as this assuagement eases me, I see the pinprick has form, and it is more than a single entity:  It is two.  As it draws closer, I see one is large and one is small, much smaller, like child with its parent.  Then the entities are discernible and I see they are anything but parent and child.  They are Adam and Abel advancing toward me hand in hand, and, seemingly to my mind, of one purpose.  And as suddenly as they appear, they are upon us.  They are immediately behind Eve and Ruth and I can see both of them because I can look down into the foursome.  I cannot account for my change in perspective.  Adam is as I remembered him, rangy; but he is without the objects that define him for me — his Segway and his guitar.  He is behind Eve, and the sight of the two together enrages me.  I boil with anger and yank back an arm to smash Adam, to obliterate him, to scatter the atoms of his ethereal mass, except my arm rears back in my imagination but not in reality, or what is reality at the moment.  I am helpless.

Then Abel scoots around and positions himself in front of Eve and Ruth, and he looks up at me with his big eyes, such baleful, piercing eyes.  I perceive judgment in them, backed by rage.  My little brother, my sweet little playmate, the sibling I helped in many ways, whom I tolerated though time and who tortured me with his super abilities.  I was so very good to him, so supportive of him, so praising of his wondrous talent.  Yet he betrayed me at every juncture of our childhood, and usurped the love of our mother for me.  Constant adulation wasn’t sufficient for him.  He was incapable of sharing anything, and most of all the attention of our mother, with me.  I want to tell him I was and am the aggrieved party, dear brother, not you.  Your callow and careless behavior, your unbridled selfishness landed you here, dear brother Abel.  Your situation is your own fault.  After all, it wasn’t I who wished, who demanded to swing higher and higher; higher than anybody had gone; higher than I, who was never allowed to accomplish anything, not even swinging, to surpass you.  Abel’s eyes tell me that even in this twilight world, he is still the king, and he seeks unjustified revenge. 

I surge with resentment as I look down on him.  But I can’t prevent myself from loving the dear boy.  He is precious to me, and endearing too and nothing epitomizes my love for him more than his missing lock of hair.  I stare down on the naked patch.  I imagine the lock.  I view it residing in our mother’s lovely hatbox.  Why, in my moments of great grief, would I steal the seconds it took to remove a lock of his hair?  For love?  For fear of losing him forever?  To ensure his closeness always, whenever I need or want him?  Abel is unfair, cruelly so.  If I destroyed him, then his action toward me would justify his treatment of me.  This I do not doubt in the least.  But why would I commit such an atrocity when I love him as much as I do?  Actually, the moment I am experiencing is somewhat joyful for me as I am really seeing my brother precisely as he was the day he died.  My joy derives from the fact I never expected to see him again, ever.  There might be truth to what I thought was superstition:  afterlife, reincarnation, the whole lot of polyglot religious promises.

I sense myself laughing, though I cannot move a muscle and nothing issues from me.  But I am rattling inside my head with laughs, and I am delirious.  I would fall down if I could move.  I am thinking, suffering to say, “You have a little sister, Abel?  You don’t wish a sister, no?  You’ll have to share with a sister, won’t you?  She’s a girl, so perhaps she is cuter than you.  Maybe she’s more talented, more skillful.  I understand girls mature much faster than we men.  Perhaps she’s a better musician, or worse, a better manipulator of our mother.  No matter how poor, she’ll surely outshine me.”

Oh, he refuses to banish his baleful stare.  Does he know about Sarah?  Of course he does; he must.  For had he not inhabited Lazarus?  Abel has always been a selfish boy; it is part of his vileness.  I marvel at his capacity for self-gratification.  He is an emotional pig feeding at the trough of adulation.  This has been the hallmark of his short little life.  I am realizing the truth now.  He was in Lazarus, as I suspected.  He knew I was drawn to Lazarus because I recognized him in the boy from the very beginning, from the moment I saw the forlorn family on the sidewalk.  It is what impelled me to offer my aid.  Abel understands I cannot live without him, just as my mother found life after Abel so very difficult, and why she tormented me with his death, though I could have easily been innocent of his demise.  No!  I was innocent.  He brought misfortune upon himself of his own volition.  As to the situation with Sarah, it seems so clear to me now.  I see her in the playground, mounting the swing, demanding — just like him, an imperious little tyke, a black hole of emotion, irresistible — insisting, petulantly, to be pushed higher, and higher, to fly higher than any child ever has on a swing set.  I wondered then why I gave into her.  I know now, the reason, for it blazes in Abel’s eyes.  It was his revenge.  He did inhabit Lazarus, the boy a mere shell for Abel, for whom or what could resist my superboy brother?  Nothing, not even me, who should have understood the power of the boy genius.  Could anything be as nefarious as his revealed plot?  As Lazarus, he antagonized Sarah.  He alienated her.  She associated me with Lazarus, for my caring attitude toward him was very obvious; I was open about it.  Yesterday — was it just a few hours ago? — he took his revenge though her:  She behaved as he had that day long ago.  It is so apparent now and I am amazed I missed it, and allowed him to deceive me.  The bright boy has trapped me, again.

Abel must have distracted me, forced me to live inside my mind.  Your own ruminations enthrall you to the point where only they, intangible phantoms though they are, are visible to you; they transubstantiate into real things.  For I cannot conceive of any other reason as to how I missed the appearance of the vixen, the sad and cruel witch who accounts for my presence in the hospital bed, at the mercy of The Pinstripes’ minions.  Sarah nonchalantly materializes from behind Abel.  Oh, I am raging, raging, as I am best able without one iota of mobility.  Every vulgarity and disparagement having ever entered my ears ricochet in my noggin like one hundred thousand pointed pinballs.  I wish I could use my voice and beat up the entire bunch with my expletives.

Sarah’s lost much of her lustrous child beauty to the accident.  Her head is swollen to twice its life size.  My thoughts regarding the lovely girl flicker, spark like flashing energy; intrude on and short-circuit my dendrites.  If she hadn’t found herself at the bottom of the stairs, perhaps she would be sporting a normal head.  No, if she hadn’t demanded to go higher and higher, she would not have a balloon for a head.  No again.  If she had held on very, very tight, her head now certainly would be considerably smaller than a reddened, electrified jack-o-lantern.  I don’t know which is the source of her problem, but it must be one on the menu.

She opens her mouth, rounds her lips and flicks her tongue, but no sound issues.  She goes on and on in this manner for some time, for an eternity.  In my frozen state, I find myself losing all my senses.  I cannot gauge time.  Seconds, minutes, hours, I can’t distinguish small units from big units.  I’m without any sense of passage.  I can’t hear either.

Sarah’s balloon head is flaming.  Her lovely small eyes are blazing.  She is talking and talking, yet I cannot hear a sound.  I can’t even feel her scorching breath, and I should as she is close to me, closer than I care her to be.  I feel desperate, because I need to know what she is saying.  Oh, I know she is disparaging me.  I know it.  She is such a little bitch.  Had she grown to womanhood, I can only pity the poor men — for she would have many men, no doubt — who would have fallen for her.  She would torment them mercilessly with her unrelenting selfishness, her demanding nature, her multitude of horrid egocentric qualities.  In retrospect, it seems fortunate she no longer lives in the physical world.

She’s talking about me.  She is accusing me.  I do not have to hear her words to comprehend her.  She blames me for her death.  I know the story.  I was her guardian.  I failed in my obligation to protect her.  I was the adult.  I should have realized she was flying too high.  She flipped over the top bar.  How much higher could she go?  How could such a small child workup the jet power to swing over the top bar?  I helped.  Kind and understanding, I helped, and she rewarded me by releasing the chain and zooming over the top bar and landing on her head on the curb.  She rewarded my good deed, my concession to her unreasonable demand by dying and creating a suspicion among people that I was, in some way, responsible.  I should have realized what would happen if she flew too high.  As if I possess a degree in physics!  Who but her God could foresee such an event?  Yet, I feel the pressure building. 

Abel subjected me to the same stabbing torment when he flew too high.  Oh, the fuss after his death.  My mother idolized Abel.  She wailed for days and days.  I lost count of the days, there were so many.  It was she who told the police she suspected something fishy.  Abel was a smart boy.  He was a careful boy.  He would never risk injuring himself.  He held such promise.  He had the potential to make a difference in the world.  He could have touched so many lives with his special skills — his music and his great mind.  And someone was jealous, she said.  Someone could not stand the attention he received, deserved though it was.  The police listened to her and they escorted me to their headquarters.  They questioned me for hours, constantly jabbing accusations, employing subterfuges to trick me into admitting complicity in Abel’s death.  I think it was hours, but time can be a slippery concept.  I cautioned them about my mother.  They wanted to know what they should watch out for.  I revealed that Abel was her favorite, and she would do anything for him and that I received no support from my mother, my own mother.  Fortunately, the police saw through her charade, her favoritism.  Why would she do such a thing to me?  This is what they wanted to know, what they could not understand.  Finally, they saw the entire situation was as simple.  My mother adored Abel; she could not bear the idea he was dead; she could not admit such a tragedy could befall the love of her life; she could not accept that quirky fate could rob her of Abel and, most important of all, the potential he possessed.  Deep down, she asked herself why it could not have been me, for in her eyes I had way less value than Abel. 

Sarah is relentless.  What are the extents of this little girl’s powers, I wonder?  In life she was a full throttle dynamo, and her death hasn’t restrained her in the least.  Honestly, I am incredulous at her vehemence and her blindness.  Her own demanding and impetuous character led directly to her untimely demise; and yet, she cannot accept the truth.  She’s like so many people these days:  looking for others to blame for their own frail natures and the fates resulting from them.  How I wish I could move.

I cast my eyes away from her, which is difficult for hers are like magnets.  But I manage the feat and latch onto the eyes of my loves, my Eve, my Ruth.  I am searching for understanding, for support, for hope they will tire of Sarah’s tirade and insist she shut up.  But I see nothing in their eyes.  Those once passionate eyes stare at me completely devoid of any emotion.  They are dead eyes, blank and insensate. 

As for Abel and Adam, well what do you expect?  Both, as if brothers, watch with nearly imperceptible sneers.  These two are so alike.  They find Sarah amusing.  Or maybe they find her biting tone, her accusations, her engine-like insistence amusing.  Or maybe it’s me they find amusing.  Maybe they, as astral beings with powers unknown to me, can sense my discomfort, even though I can’t move a muscle, can’t reflect the pain Sarah is causing me.   Their sneers reflect their enjoyment.  Of course, I understand that in all probability, Sarah is not speaking to me; Abel is.  Sarah is Abel’s avatar.  It is all clear to me now.  It wasn’t Lazarus; the entire time it was Sarah.  I sense I am a fool, a deceived idiot.

My eyes are the only parts of me I can move, and I shift them away from everybody, up and away.  As I do, I see many points of light advancing on the group.  They are like stars in the firmament, except these orbs grow larger and larger by the second, if seconds still exist in this new universe I occupy.  The orbs frighten me, for I know they portend evil.  Everything in my new world is evil, against me, and as a result anathema to me. 

And then the vanguard is distinguishable, and the others come into view.  The Cripple and his son, and many more like them, on and on and, in a moment, I fear The Pinstripes will pile on me.  The Pinstripes are my enemies and they are responsible for my predicament.  I know this to be true.

 

CHAPTER 17:  THE FRIENDS

Time has been illusory for me since Sarah flung herself from the swing set in the park.  When I awake, I am not surprised I don’t know what time it is or how long I have been under the drug the two doctors, certainly minions of The Pinstripes, administered.  It seems as if they injected me years ago.  I could have been in this bed for years.  I wonder how the world has changed since I went under.

I hold up my hands and study them, turning them over, inspecting them closely.  Nothing has changed.  No wrinkled skin, or liver spots, or overgrown nails.  It appears no more than a day has passed.

I scan the room and glance toward the stark window.  It is night.  However, in a hospital, it is never dark.  A light bar affixed to the wall behind and above my bed lights the room dimly.  The florescent bulb is encased in a yellowish plastic shield, and over the plastic is a steel mesh cage, probably to prevent the inmates from tampering with the light.  I move on my bed and notice immediately that the restraining strap is gone.  I can shift freely. 

I am nervous because the thin counterpane and sheets covering me are loose.  I require them to be snug when I am in bed at night.  These are much too insecure and I feel exposed.  I might roll out of the bed if I thrash.  I feel that, if my foes decide to remove me from bed, to carry me away, their task is made easier.  I don’t know what to do.  My instinct is to slip out of bed and remake it correctly.  But then I think it is already too late.  It is already night.  It is night and The Pinstripes will appear at any moment.  In fact, they may be grouping and preparing for their assault as I lie here.  I don’t know what to do.

The room has been silent up to this moment, but now I hear a low sound.  It is keening and at first I can’t identify from where it comes.  And then I realize it is coming from me.  I feel my throat vibrating; it is dry and harsh, as if I have been shouting.  I don’t recall yelling, but I have the sensation anyway.

Why am I whimpering like a child, moaning like a mourner at my own funeral?  I am exposed, unprotected, an easy target for The Pinstripes.  The window to the outside is black.  I don’t know the time exactly but precision isn’t important.  I know They will come, and They are coming, and They will arrive soon, and They are overdue.

I’m not in a trance any longer.  I am not under the control of the doctor minions.  I move my arms.  I flex my hands.  I sit up.  I swing my legs from under the covers and plant them on the floor.  Whether I do something or nothing, I reason, The Pinstripes will appear.  Nothing, whether I’m in bed or standing, will change my horrid fate.  Why The Pinstripes are late I do not know.  Rarely are they late.  But they have been so on a couple of occasions.  This might be another occasion, and I might have time.  Best not to waste time.

I set to work.  I circumnavigate the bed, tightening the top sheet and the light blanket.  I finish and inspect the tautness.  The bed is nearly as well made as my own.  I am concerned, however, about the light blanket.  I require a substantial counterpane.  I have found a weighty counterpane better protects me from The Pinstripes.  I notice the room has a narrow door near the bathroom and the entrance.  I walk to it, open it, and discover it’s a closet.  My clothes hang in the closet, but otherwise it is empty.  I resign myself to making do with the light blanket, return to the bed, and carefully fold back the blanket and the top sheet to form the perfect isosceles triangle.  Cautiously, I slip under the covers.  I bring the top sheet and light blanket up to the space between my chin and my lip.  I am ready.

Time passes.  I am not sleepy.  I must have been unconscious for a long time.  It was sufficient to rest me.  Now I find I can’t fall asleep.  I close my eyes and try, but to no avail.  I lie in the bed patiently awaiting The Pinstripes.

Instead of my expected visitors, the entrance door opens.  The two doctors, the man and woman, enter.  I understand what is happening immediately.  The Pinstripes are playing with me.  They are attempting to put me off my guard by mixing me up.  I resolve to steel myself against their new ploy.  I see another person enter behind the doctors.  It is a man dressed in a business suit.  I stare at him.  He is tall and thin, gaunt.  His sparse hair is gray, and some of his pink scalp is visible.  His face is long, appearing stretched due to his lengthy, narrow nose.  His lips are merely lines on his face.  His head and face frighten me.  His suit further stokes my fear.  He wears a blue pinstripe. 

I focus and concentrate on the man in the pinstripe suit as the group move toward my bed.  I study the suit.  I see it is badly cut, as if manufactured in a third-world country and sold on the street, in an alley, like purloined goods.  Maybe he is not one of them.  Maybe the similarity in attire is accidental.  He could have easily shown up wearing a cheap gray suit, or a shapeless sports jacket.  When they are close, I peer intently at his suit searching for the red-mouth larvae.  If they are present, I know I will see them.  But I see just ratty fabric. 

At my bed, the female doctor, the minion woman, speaks.  She wants to know how I am feeling, and she wonders who entered my room to make my bed.  This is an aside to her male doctor companion.  I am mum.  My policy is to say nothing, reveal nothing.  She introduces the man in the pinstripe suit as a police detective who wishes to ask me questions.  She tells me I may speak freely without fear.  I don’t believe her for a second, and fear consumes me.

Of course, I know she would attempt to reassure me, to lull me with her professionalism, and her womanly warmth, though I feel no heat emanating from her.  She is an automaton, maybe just an avatar of The Pinstripes.  As for the detective, I understand him completely.  He is no detective.  Though he is not riddled with larvae and his suit is substandard, he is a Pinstripe incarnate.  He proves it beyond reasonable doubt simply with his stance next to my bed.  He positions himself near my hair and close.  He looks down on me, erect except for his head, which hangs over me like the arm of a gallows.  His attempt to deceive me is galling; but executed in such a haphazard manner as to insult and demean me.  I would like nothing more than to reveal my knowledge; but then I would violate my policy of silence at any cost.  I summon every ounce of discipline I possess and resist the temptation.  I am determined the evil Pinstripes will not win, will never win. 

He turns away from me.  He whispers an aside to the medicos.

“Why isn’t he restrained?”

The female responds, “He’s nearly catatonic, harmless, really.”

The male adds, “We think if we give him a little freedom; you know, make it feel like less of a prison, like he’s a prisoner, he might relax.”

“Has he?”

“Relaxed?”

“Talked.”

“I’m afraid just gibberish,” says the female.

He nods at the medicos.

He is a tricky devil.  He begins by stating the obvious, my name.  He wants me to answer yes.  I reply with silence.  He states my address.  I remain silent.  He follows with statements about my length of residency, my employment, and on and on he prattles, and through it all I stay strong and silent.  I detect a hint of frustration in his tone.  Satisfaction suffuses me and I struggle mightily to contain any expression of delight, to maintain my stoicism.  Then he mentions Adam and Eve (though, of course, he uses their real names).  He asks if I knew them.  My lips are sealed.  He states that they both worked at my company.  No acknowledgement from me.  He adds they did not appear at work one day.  Not the same day but different days for each.  I stare at him.  He wonders aloud if they were romantically involved, and if their relationship might have had something to do with their disappearance.  I don’t blink an eye; however, I am astir internally, laughing until my head aches.  He smiles.  His lips are misshaped by the effort, conveying more distain than joy.  He asks, though his voice is more demonstrative than questioning, if I knew they were a couple, engaged to be married.  He tacks on the latter, in case I did not comprehend.

His statement is a zinger.  He designed it to startle me, to shake me from my silence, to rattle me, break my resolve to maintain my self-sequestered state.  I am engaged in a battle with my nature.  I want to leap from my bed and grab his throat and choke him until he admits, blue-faced, he is lying to me.  My reaction would be normal, and I know he would recognize it as action anybody would take.  My other option is to contain my feelings within me.  Most people do not possess the strength of character to keep quiet.  In this instant, hearing from a complete stranger the painful accusation about Eve is nearly too much.  I almost release myself but, instead, brace myself with knowledge.  I know my enemy.  The so-called detective is my enemy.  He is a Pinstripe inchoate.  He is the vanguard of a wily, wicked Wehrmacht, which has been waging a war against me for years.  We are engaged in the final battle.  This is why The Pinstripes have elected one of their own to appear in the flesh.  I figure the only way The Pinstripes can win against my fortress of resolve and resistance is to assume fully human form.  My will is cast from steel, the super strong carbon variety.  Nothing can penetrate it.  Certainly nothing The Pinstripes can hurl in the netherworld site of our battlefield.  They have tried for years, more years than I can count now.  Human attacking human; it is their new tactic.  I realize what my course of action must be. 

I am so very grateful I am awake and not in the dream world where I encountered the people who mean the most to me.  Naturally, I do not like the idea they have turned against me.  At the moment, though, I appreciate the use of my limbs.  I wiggle my toes and unclench my fists.  I use my hands to carefully fold down the covers.  Though my movements are slow and deliberate, the detective retreats, displaying the characteristics of surprise and caution.  I attempt to reassure him with a smile.  I further slow down my movements in support of my cause.  When I complete my folding, the detective returns to his spot.  He again hovers over me, obviously attempting to intimidate.  He hangs his head, such a drooping daisy he is.  This is when I push down on the bed with the full weight of my body and I fire my right arm and clenched right hand up at his dangling countenance like a mallet affixed to a rocket.

My thrust takes everybody by surprise, including me.  Actually, I am shocked.  I am by nature and avocation a peaceful, gentle man.  Honestly, I cannot recall inflicting unearned punishment on any creature since the unfortunate episode with Fifi (which doesn’t count as every boy has a piece of the devil in him when under ten).  However, I suppose my action wasn’t raw brutality; it was justice in retribution for the anguish I have suffered at the hands of the so-called detective’s associates, The Pinstripes.  Serves him right, too, for bending his Modigliani head over me. 

The general howling subsides before I finish my thought, and the return to reasonable silence allows me to concentrate.  Then I become aware of what I have done to myself:  My hand hurts like hell and it’s wet with blood.  His or mine?  At the moment I’m not sure.

I am retracting my arm as he is pinching the bridge of his nose in an effort to tourniquet and staunch the outflow.  The male doctor is maneuvering around with his hands extended, no doubt to restrain me, though, of course, I require no such thing; the detective, and the doctors, certainly have provoked me and I am perfectly justified in defending myself.  Though righteous, I am already regretting damaging the detective’s nose, for I have a good idea of what is about to transpire. 

As if summoned by telepathic command, two men in white materialize behind the doctors.  They nudge the medicos who move to the side.  I fully expect a pummeling.  However, their mission is restraint and I see flashing in their hands the restraining belts of earlier.  Their retaliation is so unfair, but I expect nothing less, for these men, these doctors, the so-called detective, the entire hospital, if it is a hospital — all are agents of The Pinstripes.  I am desperate, and I don’t know what to do.  I know I cannot win in a battle against two men who each are twice my size; and I am weak; I have no reserves of strength left in me; my legs tingle with enervation; my arms now are weights, no longer tools of resistance.  I think The Pinstripes may have won.  I don’t know what to do.

Hopeless, I resort to pleading for mercy.  I say — no, actually I sense I am screaming — I will do whatever they wish me to do.  I will confess to anything they believe I have done.  I will go from the hospital quietly.  I will live in my apartment and never contact anyone.  I will never leave my apartment, if that is their wish.  I will not resist The Pinstripes when they visit me in the night.  I will lie naked on my bed, forsake my protective covers, expose myself completely to The Pinstripes.  As proof of my sincerity, I attempt to tear at the meager clothing I am wearing.  But I discover I cannot budge my arms, because the two men are upon me, flanking me, and they are pressing my arms, now no stronger than cooked noodles, into the bed.  I am in a panic as the male doctor approaches me from the top of the bed.  He holds a hypodermic upright.  The liquid in it is clear and the tip of the needle glistens.  I stare at the hypo as it approaches my arm, as the needle enters my arm, as the liquid burns me into oblivion.

 

CHAPTER 18:  JOIN US

I open my eyes on a black void.  I am aware I have been rendered unconscious, and yet here I am thinking and assessing my situation.  Am I out of it?  Insensate?  Hallucinatory?  I fit none of those descriptions.  I am aware.  I am awake, although my lids are drawn over my eyes. 

Time passes, or at least I believe it does.  Nothing happens, except I exist in blackness.  However, unlike last time, I’m not standing.  I am lying in a bed, but it doesn’t feel like the hospital bed.  I know this bed.  It is my bed.  I know it is because I have a weighty counterpane over me, and a blanket, and a top sheet.  These are drawn tightly across me, and there is the triangular flap.  Awakening in the void, I fear that Sarah and her boosters will again confront me and taunt and taunt.  So I admit I am relieved at the nothingness, which is infinitely preferable to the jeering gang.

However, I discover I am not alone.  For looming over me, breathing down on me, breathing fiercely for I feel their exhales on me like foul gales, are The Pinstripes.  Dread surges through me.  They have come, as I knew they would.  But this visit is different.  For although I am in my bed and am protectively cocooned, I know I am not safe; I know nothing is real here, except for me and The Pinstripes.  I am naked before them.  Finally, I am totally at their mercy; and they are merciless.  They are starved creatures, and the red-mouth larvae slithering within the threads of their fine suits; their precisely tailored attire; their testaments to dominance — these voracious monsters are profuse and more fearsome than The Pinstripes themselves.  Every cell in my body is alive with terror.  I realize my end is at hand.  The sole question is:  How horrible will it be?

Just as always, they loom over me.  Thousands and thousands, millions of The Pinstripes arch over me, over each other, those in the rear anxious to come closer to me, crowding their fellows so the mass of them seethe as much as the red-mouth larvae living in their threads.  Those rear legions appear strange to me now.  Until this moment I have not given them more thought than their being the same as those close at the edge of my bed.  Yet now I realize they are different.  I can see their long, brooding faces; their drooping features; their intensely sad and yearning countenances.  How strange it is.  How strange I can see their faces so clearly.  I ponder the phenomenon.  I realize for the first time, after years of torment, that those farther from me, those extending to the horizon, into infinity, they are giants.  They are like the Titans; but not godlike.  More like angry, manipulative, meddling demigods. 

They begin their mantra, words I cannot understand.  Their lips move and they emit sound, the familiar long and monotonous riff.  Though I have been through the drill thousands of times, still I attend closely in hopes of finally discerning what they wish from me, or how they will destroy me. 

Then I experience a miracle, for I understand a word.  It is “Us.”  Us!  I contemplate the pronoun, turning it under and over in my mind, attempting to comprehend the objective.  I realize they are referring to themselves.  Us!  All these years, they’ve been talking about themselves.  I repeat the word over and over to myself and then aloud, afraid, but also awed by the simplicity of it.  If only I’d been listening closely, I would have heard it.  Thinking this, I decide to shut down my mind, wipe it clear, a tabula rasa, if you will, in hopes other words will reveal themselves to me.  It is impossible, though, and frustrating.  It’s like an obsession, the word “Us.”  I have to sound it in my brain.  I am compelled to construct it of substance, variously of red bricks, stones, wood, glass, plants, raw dirt, water, clouds, people, dogs — all spelling “Us.”  And even Eves, Ruths, Sarahs.  I cannot stop the repetition or I will go insane.

The Pinstripes loom over me, frightening creatures with scarier creatures within themselves, and yet now they seem less terrorizing.  I am beginning to understand them, and understanding allays my fear.  They are concerned with themselves.  Maybe they mean me no harm, but just want to communicate with me.  And if we can understand each other, perhaps they will be satisfied and they will leave me alone.  They chant over me.  “Us” is so distinct I castigate myself for not having discerned the word years ago.  All the sleep I have lost because I was unable to hear.  All the horror I suffered through for wont of keen ears.  I feel like a fool, and am embarrassed.  My body heats up and my face burns.  I’m sure it is bright red.  They must think me an idiot.  All these years they’ve wanted only to talk to me and I have been too dense to hear it, too wrapped up in myself to hear them.  No more, I vow.  I will listen closely and get the full meaning of what they are saying. 

I strain against the counterpane.  I cant my head to raise my telephone ear toward them like a funnel through which their words can flow down into my brain.  I command my brain to work harder, to bring every ounce of gray matter to bear in an all out effort to comprehend them.  And it works, for I hear another word of their chant, and it is the only word I must know, as this one word completes their message to me.  The word is “Join.”  The chant is, has always been, an immemorial invitation to “Join us.”

I am between stark terror and elation.  To be one of them!  Absorbed into the great undulating mass pocked with bloody mouthed larvae.  Creatures devouring bits of me forever.  Being replenished daily, Sisyphus-like, in ugly, perpetual cruelty.  To be released from the terror of their hanging, looming heads; to puzzle no longer over their ominous chant.  To slumber.  Just to close my eyes and sleep deeply for hours on end; to be of them but free of them, too.  These are causes for boundless joy.

How could I have missed their call all these years?  It is beyond clarity.  They have been incessant and insistent.  They are not asking if I would like to join them.  They aren’t imploring me to be like them.  No, they are demanding I become one of them.  It is frightening and relieving.  They will no longer visit me at night and keep me awake.  I will not see them as creatures of the night dispatched to torment me.  I have led an innocent life.  I might be forced to be a member of their nocturnal clan, but I will be free.  I might be their prisoner, but they will haunt me no more.  As one of them, I will be immortal. 

I’ve suffered over mortality, my own and of those I loved.  I loved Abel … love, for I can never conceive of Abel or any of the others I love as not existing.  They do go on in many manifestations and in many places.  Abel, Eve, and Ruth live in my mind, in my heart; in my mother’s lovely hatbox with the delightful Parisian scene; in my freezer, and in the gorgeous outdoors, my personal park complete with babbling brook, by a meadow dotted with little mounds, so small they are visible to me only.  Even those for whom I hold mixed emotions — Adam, The Cripple, his son, and Sarah, too, even though she was such a difficult person and the reason for my present situation — I preserve even these souls.  As I am unattached, alone in the world, no parents or wife or lover or descendants, I often fret over my perpetuation.  How will I live on; how will I enjoy the immortality I’ve awarded those I love, and those who have merely intersected my life? 

This has vexed me to the point where I have placed myself in mortal danger in the hope I will discover a caring person, one as caring as me.  How I desire a community to love me so deeply they will undertake the burden of preserving me, of granting me the immortality I ache for.  In my quest for such a savior, the grantor of my salvation, I have journeyed to the dismal sections of cities.  I have visited bar after bar in these parts of the cities.  They are raucous joints jammed with many brutal people; but I always hoped, somewhat like Diogenes, to discover the few noble creatures, those who understood they possess the power to free others of life, to grant the peace of immortality, to do this to me, as I have to the people I have loved.  In the end, though, my search was fruitless; the good eluded me.  My sole pleasure was to clean locales of assorted vermin, though these rats left no impression upon me.

Of course, then I learned not to expect immortality.  The realization saddened me greatly, for I knew those I loved would die with me.  The memory of them would flicker to nothing more than static, and not even that after I breathed my last. 

This is why the call of The Pinstripes arrests me so.  If they are as they purport, I and my cherished ones will live on.  Yes, The Pinstripes might maintain me in absolute agony for infinity; but I resolve to accept their torment for the sake of my loves.

But, I wonder, how do I join them?  How does a physical being transform himself into a phantom that lives … where do The Pinstripes live?  If it is in the world, in the shadows as shadows, those black creatures who scurry about in chiaroscuro dusk, in gray rooms, in shaded scrubs, in the twilight, and, too, in the brightly lighted bedrooms of tortured souls, then I will live on.  But if they live only in my mind, as the psychiatrist claimed so many years ago, then I will be lost, I will cease to exist, for how can I exist in a dead mind, which will transform to organic jelly, and then not even that?

I stare intently at The Pinstripes crowding round me.  I concentrate on their faces, long, gray, blank, and yet muttering insistently.  They appear real enough to me.  They possess wrinkles, deep etchings around their noses and mouths.  They have pores.  They have beards; maybe I should say potential beards as they are closely shaved.  And they talk.  No feat of telepathic communication; real words from real mouths.  I can even see their tongues curl and glide as they implore me to “Join us.”  Yes, these are actual, physical beings, immortals that have probably been visiting humans since there were humans.  I should feel privileged.  They have selected me to join their order, to be an immortal too.  They issued their invitation to me years ago, shortly after a swing and carelessness had ushered Abel to an early death.

While they are not telepathic, somehow I know exactly what I am to do.  They have not articulated the actions required of me, but I know my next steps as clearly as if the directions had issued from their collective mouths.  It is an odd phenomenon not understanding them for all the years and now comprehending their mere thoughts.

I ease the counterpane and sheets off me and carefully fold them into the shape of a perfect isosceles triangle.  The Pinstripes observe my maneuver and interrupt their incantation briefly, nearly imperceptibly, in approval.  They articulate no feeling, do nothing to indicate to the rational mind that they approve of my actions; and yet I know instinctively they are pausing to encourage me. 

I study the triangle for a few moments, or what I take for an interval of moments.  Its preciseness fills me with an indiscernible warmth, as if my cloth geometry stores the power asserted for the Egyptian pharaohs.  Of course, nothing of the sort exists, or ever has, but knowing this does nothing to diminish the wonderful sense I have, the warmth I feel from the good tidings of those I regarded as my enemy for years upon years.  Such wasted years it turns out, as my own concocted fears have prevented me from relishing the bliss I now feel.  To think, I could have experienced this sensation years ago.  The waste is sufficient to elicit a scream; except I am extremely blissful and anger cannot topple my towering wall of joy.

Slowly, carefully, with great attention to the reaction of The Pinstripes, I pull free the covers on the right side, carefully lift them, and then slip from under them, and I stretch full length on them, fully exposed.  Their reaction is … nothing, for they continue as always, muttering their mantra, “Join us.”  I focus on them; it seems I am taking in all of them, the millions of them, in one steady gaze.  I swing my legs over the edge of the bed, fearing they might not move, and I will touch them; and if I should touch, I don’t know what the consequences will be.  I envision the red-mouth larvae surging from their weaved domiciles, opening their bloody maws, and devouring me.  I get a sickening sense of terror in my chest, the kind that grips and tightens your throat, that weighs on your chest, until there is nothing left to do but stop breathing.  However, I am committed and determined and my legs go off the edge of the bed.

The Pinstripes retreat, not much, but enough to allow me to set my feet on the floor and sit upright in their presence.  I have never been in this position before them.  I have always been afraid they will swarm me.  My only defense against this eventuality has been my bed.  Yet now I see all my precautions weren’t necessary, for The Pinstripes have never meant me harm.   Their intonation is the truth:  They want me, not to torture, but as part of them. 

I pause and observe.  The Pinstripes no longer loom.  They are erect now, giants at their full heights.  I stand, and I discover I am also tall, a giant among the giants.  I have grown, mysteriously sprouted, and am like them.  Interestingly, I feel stretched in every department of my physical self.  My feet are bigger platforms, and my face, without seeing it, I know is longer.  Even my nose feels larger. 

Upright, I understand what I must do to “Join us.”  I turn my back on The Pinstripes directly in front of me and find myself facing The Pinstripes assembled behind me.  I hang over the bed.  I cast my eyes down and admire how precisely I have made it.  Now I begin to unmake it.  I work meticulously, for though I am undoing my work I see no reason to be sloppy about it.  I have never been a slovenly person, not one day in my life.  I’ve forever prized neatness and organization, and pride myself on being such a person and associating with others who are the same.  Thus, you will not be surprised by my approach.  I take the counterpane and fold it into a perfect rectangle.  I do the same with the top sheet and the bed sheet.  I place the counterpane and sheets side by side on the stripped bed. 

Instinctively, I know I must select the top sheet.  As I do, The Pinstripes intensify their chanting.  Their tone strikes me as excited, gaily so.  Encouraging.  I unfold the top sheet and refold it into a long strip.  It now resembles a priest’s stole.  I hold my stole draped at its center over my two hands.  For a reason I can’t articulate, I raise it to the mob of Pinstripes in the supplicating manner of offering a host, and they respond reverently, bowing their heads, assuming the familiar hung-head pose.  I raise it higher and they deepen their bow.  I sense I am part of, the star of, a ritual, and it is not a new ritual; rather, it is one that has been performed in this manner for years, decades, centuries, for as long as humans have existed. 

I know I must walk to the foot of the bed, and The Pinstripes step back for they have implanted in me that this is the path I must take.  I move slowly, with studied deliberation, to the foot of the bed, where they have cleared a space for me.  I see the footboard has handholds molded into the hard plastic.  I lift the sheet stole over my head.  I settle it on my shoulders.  I bend and thread one end of the stole through the first handhold and I knot it.  I yank on it to ensure it is secure.  I sit on the floor and stretch my legs to their full length, into the space cleared for this purpose by The Pinstripes, who remain bowed, not hung-head now but bowed reverentially.  The floor, highly polished tile, is hard, but I am surprisingly comfortable.  I could easily sit here for hours; but, of course, I don’t have hours ahead of me.

I take the remainder of the stole and wrap it once around my neck.  I knot it snuggly, but not enough to cause me discomfort.  It is about as tight as a necktie.  I think I am smiling; I feel as if I am smiling.  I am happy.  I am soaring.  I feel light, released from the suffering the vengeful Sarah has inflicted upon me.  I know I am on the verge of escape.  Of all the moments of my life, I now experience the most joyful:  I am in bliss.

I lean forward sufficiently for the stole to pressure my neck.  I know what I am doing.  I have read many times how people strangle themselves; how they pass away without much pain.  It is true.  I am not in pain.  The cinching is mildly discomforting, but by no means is it painful.  I knew it would not be.  I smile at my imminent new life, at what I’ve hoped for, my afterlife; at the kindness I have bestowed upon those I truly loved, Ruth and Eve; at the wonderful choice I made in saving them from long mortality, of ushering them into their eternal lives.  I smile at what the medicos and the detective, all of whom I finally understand are not of my new community, will discover when they return:  me, escaped into what they only know as death.

And now weariness consumes me, as if I haven’t slept in days, months, ever.  I am exhausted as the pressure of the stole disappears from my mind, and I blissfully enter into my eternal rest.