33. Names

I don’t remember them, really. Probably nobody else does, either, which is why they’re here—or what remains of them, anyway. Some might still be more or less intact, in body anyway. Others have become the grass that’s cut—every day, I guess—during the summer. And the rain, the mud that drowns the flowers before even a branch, a finger, can poke from the ground—it all becomes their bones; it becomes them.

And I’m here now, with them. I’m all they’ve got, and they’re all I’ve ever had. Someone once said that God is the only friend the poor have. What about the dead? Do they need friends? Do they have any?

Well, I’m here and I can’t honestly say I’ve ever been anybody’s friend. Maybe I couldn’t’ve been, even if I’d wanted to, even if anybody’d wanted me. I never mentioned my own name, or at any rate whatever name I was using, to anyone. And I rarely asked anyone’s name: All names have been lies, or at least inventions. They’ve never, ever described the person, place or thing or animal to which they’ve been attached. Nothing and nobody ever can, or will.

I’ve come to see a woman I called mother. To my knowledge, nobody else did. She almost never used the name she gave me, or any other name at all: not when we were in the kitchen together, not when we were on the opposite ends of a telephone line. And the name she called me—on those rare occasions when she used it—wasn’t the same as the ones I’d use later. And how would they’ve known that they knew me by a different name from the one mother first gave me?

So there were two facts mother knew about me for certain: that I was born to her, and the date on which I was born. And one day there’ll be one other fact, incontrovertible, she won’t know about me—unless, of course, she’s going somewhere neither of us knows about. That fact, of course, is the date of my death.

And there they were, the only certainties on a tombstone I saw this morning: October 31, 1918-December 23, 1969. What it didn’t mention: He died on this block, and ocean and part of a continent separating him from the shtetl where he was born inside the walls, and the fence he managed to slip through, only to end up on this block. Now that mother’s gone, I may be the only one who remembers the name to which he introduced me: Adam Melnyk.

And here’s another—one of whom I knew only a name—November 15, 1934-April 14, 1953. I’d heard he’d won a medal of some sort for leading a charge—and trying to save someone whose name he didn’t know—on a hill he knew only as a pair of numbers on a chart, in a country whose name he’d seen only in a geography textbook when he was a kid. Then he came back to this block.

But there’s one other. Now that mother’s about to become another marker in that cemetery, I’m the only one who knows that this one has not a single piece of accurate, much less true, information, except for the date of death: June 18, 1992. The date of birth is given as August 5, 1967.

First of all, I know that I was more than 25 years old on the date to which this person’s death was assigned. So he was certainly older than that.

Not only that, nobody knows the exact date of his death—except me. On the day on which his death was recorded, rainy, unseasonably cold weather was also recorded. I know that’s right; I was there. For that matter, I’d have to say he died on June 18, 1992. But the coroner, or whoever else was responsible, accepted this as fact only because the body was found and someone decided he hadn’t been dead more than a few hours.

Although I know he died that day—I was there—the others, full of their arrogant belief in gathered data, can be no more certain that June 18 was the date of his death than that it was the day the universe—what anybody knows of it, anyway—began.

And the birthdate: It had no more to do with him than I did with his. That date came from a driver’s license I’d taken from one of my customers. I almost felt bad about it: Somehow the curly dark hair and the cheek and jaw line, sharp even under layers of flesh—somehow, I thought I’d seen them as often as my own face. And I could rub my fingers, up and down his chest, along his arms and legs, all around his cock, it seemed, without rippling any of the coarse hairs that covered his body. And I was making no more of an effort to please him than I did for any other paying customer.

At the time, I knew that license would be useful—not for me, of course. But I didn’t know how until I got back to the block and encountered the man whom police and the coroner would assign the birthdate on the license.

He didn’t look much, if at all, older than the image on that license. And that was the story about him on this block: somehow he didn’t change; maybe he’d gained a few pounds and lost a few curls of hair, or grew some hair. But he never seemed, in any story I heard, to grow older or younger. And I heard he had another son, possibly by the woman I call mother.