59. Exile's Children

 

I didn’t leave this block because I felt stifled or tortured. Nor did I go with any mission or calling, or even any sort of ambition beyond staying alive. And I wanted that because, as the saying goes, “What’s the alternative?” I still don’t have the answer.

Long before I knew I would undergo the transformation I’m about to culminate, I knew I couldn’t stay. Even before I learned about the hormones, the surgeries and the people who submitted to them, I knew that some part of me wouldn’t survive the move from here. Yet it was necessary for survival—mine, at any rate. And, I realize now, the reason mother never begged me to come back was that she knew, too. She always expected I’d return, however briefly.

Somehow she survived this place—until now, anyway. I’m not sure she would’ve had she left. But she had no reason—or at least not the same one I had—to get out of here. A mother, a single mother, like many others here—most of whom were here before her—there’s never been any shame in that here, at least not among the women. The nuns were a different story. “You didn’t have a father. You’ll never become a man,” Sister Elizabeth yelled at me in a room full of kids who would’ve snickered had she not slashed the air with her long wooden ruler. And she wasn’t the only one who reminded me—actually, who reminded the other kids, I didn’t need it—of my family situation.

It was probably all I had in common with other kids on this block. There were a couple of others in Sister Elizabeth’s class that day. One—Howard—laughed, for which Sister Elizabeth slapped him. But the other, Louisa Parker, slid her pale oval face into her long angular hands so I could see only her shaggy dark hair.

They’re gone, too. Howard ended up in the army. Whether he joined or was sentenced to it, no one’s exactly sure. He ended up in some place in the Middle East—some place where all you see are men—and never returned. No one ever said why. And Louisa—all I know is that someone saw her on a street in New Orleans, or in some other city besides this one. Why she left this block, I don’t know. Can’t say I can’t blame her because I don’t know whether she had to leave. She probably did: It’s the only way I know of that anybody goes from here.

58. Moment Fugue

 

When you’re on this block, you have one thing in common with anyone else here: the moment, this moment. Some have lived in it for longer than you; others’ve just come into it. But you and they and I—are all in it, for the moment, for as long as we’re here.

Maybe you really do have to die to leave it. I don’t remember who told me that. Maybe Adam, maybe mother. Or maybe—like the question you know not to ask—I learned it simply from being here, just from being. That’s how Adam and mother left. And the man who fathered me. The lady whose name I never knew is still here, and Mrs. Littington, for all that she participated in the gossip, was never part of it because everybody knew she wasn’t staying. And of course, after today she’ll be gone again, having flitted into and out of the moment, the last mother and I will have.

Now, only now. I’ve been to lots of other places where people lamented some monument or edifice that once stood in their midst, in their moment. Then it was smashed, exploded or burned and something else was assembled in its place. Or maybe the place is left empty. The people mourn the passing of whatever’d been there before but they stop remembering it the moment it was gone. No one remembers the squalid squares in the old railway stations or the drab columns of office buildings, apartment houses or the local store. Somehow, in memory, whatever is lost rises into towering arches filled with the soft, smoky haze of sun through windows high near the ceiling. Anything—even the moment of this block—can dissipate in that light.

On my way back to this block, I passed by the onetime financial center of this city. Its most famous—tallest—structures were gone, leveled by what architects, engineers, scientists and those who wrote and spoke for them claimed their steel-girded glass boxes could withstand. I called mother when I heard about their destruction. Just making sure she was all right, even though I knew she’d never been anywhere near them. Everyone, it seemed, who’d ever seen a photo of the buildings was calling somebody. Other people’d had to wait hours to get to one of the phones on the street. Not me—Gail, whom I’d met while I was still cursing Vivian, slipped a cell phone into my bag. I didn’t realize I had the phone until the first time it rang. When the buildings fell, I broke her rule that I use it only to answer her, and called mother.

Now I use only cellphones.

I’m getting away from myself. Those houses of cathode ray screens and paper, built like a box of drinking straws with the middle straws removed, were gone. I noticed their absence only because nothing stood in their place. I recalled how they cast shadows over the streets, the people, even the other tall buildings around it. But the fall of those steel beams, and the glass panes shackled to the fluorescent space around them, did not flood the corners and alleyways with suddenly-unsealed sunlight. The skyscrapers that still stood spread over each other and stilted solar pulses through the channels between offices and cigar stores, the snakeskin-smoothed sidewalks and the coiled cables of the bridge between that part of town and the precincts around this block.

“The Towers,” as everyone called them, were gone. But apart from their general shape—breadboxes sliced on the ends and sides with serrated knives—I could recall nothing else about them. Not the details, scarecely visible on such tall buildings, yet present enough for the news reports to point out as metalworkers took apart what remained after the explosions. I vaguely recalled the view from the top, the end of some trip on a school bus and up a series of elevators with a bunch of boys who wanted to beat up a “faggot” and a teacher—a nun who would—could ‘--ve done nothing to stop them. I knew there was something called an ”observation deck” at the end of the elevator ride, but it could’ve been a milk crate for all that I could recall.

It’d been part f some moment long ago, which might’ve continued to today had I or the Towers not gone. But the fall was inevitable: the Towers’ moment wouldn’t, couldn’t, last into this one. Nor could that moment in which I lived through the births-- and the deaths I witnessed and helped to cause.

After mother’s buried, the moment—long as it was—of this block will end, at least for me. The lady whose name I never knew—I don’t know. No one else from that time remains here. Then again, the moment began before Mrs. Littington came to this block, before I was born, before she or mother were born. And it continued through the disappearance of the man who fathered me and the day when the police retrieved a body and gave it my former name.

57. Who Do They Talk To?

 

I don’t know whether Mrs. Littington knows about the man whose body was found in the basement. The body with my name. Maybe the lady whose name I never knew told her. Then again, I suspect not. Why would they begin speaking now? But you never know what circumstances will prompt.

There’s no reason—I hope—for either of them to talk to me now. I’d had a close call on the way to the bathroom when the lady whose name I never knew followed me—or so I thought. For sure, she’d turn the glance she caught of me into a cross-examination. When you’re a kid on this block, it seems that adults are always doing that to you—even the ones who’d never talk to you, or let you talk to them, under any other conditions.

Even if they know, it won’t matter. Or so I hope. Who’s Mrs. Littington going to tell, anyway. Wherever she’s going, I’m sure there’s no one to whom any of this’ll matter. As for the other woman: With mother gone, who can she talk to? I don’t think she gets out—of this block—much; she never did. What she’s wearing now looks like one of those housedresses she always wore, only in black.

Shehasn’t angled her head toward Mrs. Littington the way she did with mother. I’d never see her actually turn her eyes, her nose, her mouth, in the direction of mother. But I could always tell when she was turning her attention toward mother, when she was about to speak as soon as I couldn’t hear.

I’m hoping she doesn’t, for the first time (at least to my knowledge), do the same with Mrs. Littington. They’d’ve had at least one common topic—mother—for gossip or whatever. And if they talked about her, I imagine they’d talk about me, whether or not they realized I was in the room with them, not in that cellar on that last cold afternoon before summer, when the police found the body to which they’d attach my name—my former name.

Hopefully, I won’t have another close encounter today. I never could’ve explained myself to anyone on this block when I was living here—at least, not in any way that they could hear. Then again, I never could’ve told them anything they’d wanted to know. Nothing’s changed.: I know, therefore I can’t say.

Could they’ve recognized me, even after all those years and all the changes? Of course, they say some things never change. Once, by chance, I met a friend of Vivian’s in a café, far away from this block or her town. “I recognize you from someplace. Your eyes…” Her name flashed into my mind, but of course I couldn’t say it. I pretended to ignore her, and she left.

56. Identification

At least I haven’t seen any cops. Maybe it wouldn’t matter if I did. Could they make a positive ID of me? They couldn’t with that body in the basement; how could they identify a living person? Especially if that person’s changed since the police started searching?

Not that they have any reason for stopping or questioning me. Not really. Then again, the cops, especially the ones around here, know how to extract confessions from mouths that never had to hold secrets. Vivian used to talk about the “highway blues,” when an officer could tail you, pull up alongside you and pull you over even though you hadn’t gone over the speed limit or in the wrong lane, and somehow you’d do something—you couldn’t deny it—and the officer would write a summons. Really, officer, I didn’t kill anyone. Especially not mother. Of course not. I hadn’t even been on the block at the time she died—or when the body in the basement gave up its last. Everybody—at least the woman whose name I never knew—knows that. I hadn’t been here in years. How many? Well, gee, officer, I’m not quite sure. So much has happened and well, you know how time flies.

But they’re not here now. Just me, Mrs. Litttington, the woman whose name I never knew—and mother’s body, in the casket.

55. Before Tomorrow

 

Today. Just today. I just have to get through this day in one piece. It’s the only way anybody’s ever lived on this block and it’s the only mode of life I’ve known since I left.

I can’t say whether anything’ll change after tomorrow. I know that I’ll never come back to this block again. It’s not a choice: I have no choice. Not that I’ve ever wanted to return. But I have no such choice in any event. Never did, probably never will.

Just today. Tomorrow, if it goes the way I foresee it, we bury mother. Hopefully, nothing’ll complicate maters until then. Mrs. Littington and the woman whose name I never knew glance in my direction, but neither speaks to me. Maybe they talk to each other when I’m out of sight, but I don’t recall that they had much, if anything, to say to do with each other when we were on this block. Their only connection was mother, and I’ve no idea of how much they talked about each other to her.

I’m not even sure that Mrs.L. and the lady recognize each other now, although—somehow not surprisingly—Mrs. L. seems not to’ve aged beyond a few gray flecks in her darker-than-chestnut hair. The edges of her hair that frame her forehead, temples and ears have softer, wavier edges than those of the sharper cut she wore when she lived on this block—but somehow even that seems not to’ve changed much, either. For that matter, the lady whose name I never knew doesn’t seem much older than I recall her, either; but her loose and dry skin always made her seem older than mother, or most of the other people on this block. Then again, I’d just barely passed puberty the last time I saw her. All the adults—which is to say the women—on this block seemed like fixtures that’d always been there.

Every once in a while, she catches my gaze. Maybe she won’t ask questions. That’s the unwritten—That goes without saying!—code of this block. Then again, she never needed to ask questions, or so it seemed.

Another code is not to tell, at least not so the person who’s being told about knows. Would she? Could she? Who was it who told me, “Them that know don’t tell; but them who tell don’t know”? What did thatt person know? What does she know? What—who—would she tell? Being on this block, still, she had to’ve heard about the body in the cellar. The one with my name—my former name—on it. And my date of birth. But not my date of death. Surely she had to’ve known better than to believe that version of the end of a life. On this block, who’d’ve remained, by that time, who’d’ve had any reason to kill me? The men—the boys—were all gone by then. Including me.

Who, then, ‘d’ve gone through the trouble of striking him on the head hard enough to knock him to the ground, but not hard enough to prevent him from regaining consciousness. Who’d’ve been anygry, obsessive or whatever enough to tie him by his hands and feet and tape his mouth while his eyes were shut? To peel the too-tight black pants and bikini brief away from his hairy midsection? Or—when he regained consciousness and grunted because he couldn’t beg for mercy—took a sawtoothed switchblade and gnarled at the base of his scrotum and removed an organ which to this day has not been found? And finally pulled—actually, slid and slogged—the briefs and pants back over the bloody crotch, hooked the waist tab and zipped the fly shut just as red heat began to ooze through them?

Could she’ve known t he answers, or enough to question what I –or the man whose body was identified as mine—would’ve been doing anywhere near this block at that time? As far as she knew—or so I thought—I was long gone, and possibly dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what mother told her. Or if she said nothing at all, except that I don’t think that lady’d’ve let her.

Hopefully, she won’t ask any more questions—or talk any more—about him or me, or to me—before this day is over, before I can leave for good, like mother, tomorrow.

One more day and mother finally gets to rest. And I’ll be able to continue—and hopefully complete—my transformation.

54. Omerta

 

The official reports called Adam’s death a suicide. Given the circumstances under which he was found, it wouldn’t—couldn’t—‘ve been ruled any other way. The police department, the medical examiner and others involved in the case would therefore not be required to investigate any further. And there wasn’t any reason for them to do so: They found no more physical evidence and after questioning people on the block—including mother and Mrs. Littington—they probably didn’t know any more about Adam, or why he filled his apartment with cooking gas.

The people of this block could stop any questioning or discussion of any incident—such as Adam’s death—even faster than the officials of the city or state ever could. Mother or the nuns—and later, the teachers—always told me I asked too many questions. I hadn’t seen him for several months—an era, at that time in my life—before the police marked off that front stoop with their orange bands.

Mother, who’d had more troubles than I’d realized then, said it’s something she could’ve done, but she could only think of those she’d leave behind. I’m sure other women on this block felt the same way. Sister Elizabeth said that in times of trouble everyone has a patron saint—and God. But what if…She wouldn’t say any more about it and would upbraid my mother for her child’s “morbid curiosity.”

Snow covered the stoop; it cleared away. The stoop, then the house, were painted over, but nobody moved in. Everybody, it seemed, could tell when I was going to ask about Adam, about what happened that night before Christmas Eve, when the wind that carried the snow and whispered its hissing admonition to close one’s eyes and leave the darkness under blankets, under layers of snow.

The sun had already disappeared behind heavy veils of clouds; the full moon—it was so bright I could sit next to the window in my room and read by it—illuminated the last clear sky I could remember seeing for a long time afterward.

During the spring that followed, it seemed that the woman whose name I never knew was taking more care than usual to keep her bushes from growing up over her flowers, or the sidewalk. Sunny days were full of overpowering glare we were used to seeing only on those summer days when people stayed inside their houses or in shade.

Out in the sun on such a day, you could exhale and it would feel like wind from the surface of the sun rushing back at your face. And the clouds, and even the rain, seized the flaking, peeling bricks and stained and tarnished metal sheets of the houses and bound them in a thick gray haze that seemed still only because the people of this block hadn’t noticed—or had forgotten—when it came and went.

Sister Elizabeth lost patience she never had and slapped me across the face for “thinking about evil, selfish deeds” and not keeping my mind on the day’s lesson. What did I care about base six numeral systems—I think that’s what she was teaching—anyway? What did that have to do with Adam or mother or me or anyone else on the block? About as much as patron saints had to do with Adam, I thought. Would he’ve been alive had he known what a polynomial or a declension was? Would any of the stuff they were teaching’ve made my father—whom I didn’t know, or rather, didn’t want to know—care enough to stay with me and mother, or made him able to help us, or at least not to hurt us?

Catechism, mathematics, all those subjects whose names come from languages nobody on this block spoke or would care to speak—What good would those things do him, me, mother, anybody? But mother still insisted I go to school and learn. She responded to my protests that “you never needed that stuff” with the same glancing glare she gave whenever I mentioned Adam or asked about the ones—almost always teenaged boys and men—whom I saw one day and were gone another.

Through that year, the sun glared more blindingly and clouds grew heavier and more impenetrable like secrets. The haze between them draped windows and doors all over this block.

Nobody wanted to hear the stories Adam told me, and after his death mother and Sister Elizabeth and everyone else wanted me to forget them. The cops’d asked mother, Mrs. Littington, the woman whose name I never knew—everyone, it seemed, except me—what they knew about Adam. At first, I’d thought they skipped me only because of my age: They didn’t ask the few other kids on this block, either.

Then again, the cops were like the adults on this block and the teachers in one way: If you were a kid, they’d ask you questions only if they thought you’d done something wrong, or knew who did. That is to say, they’d ask if they thought you could give the answers they wanted to hear. Certainly, I couldn’t’ve told them any more than they already knew about the circumstances of that night Adam died. By the same token, I’m sure they weren’t ready to hear me recount the stories he told me, any more than they’d have any use for one inescapable fact: The adults of this block were speaking in the same furtive, clipped tones—and were scolding me and other children into silence in the same ways—as they did after any death or other tragedy or mishap the people of this block would deny or try to wash away.

53. Winter

 

Some things I’ll never understand. Others, they won’t—not Mrs. Littington, the lady whose name I never knew—understand. Including the one thing I’m still trying to explain to myself.

The way Adam died. The story we all heard, the one that’s listed in the reports, is suicide. Found with head in oven, gas turned on. Still cold in the apartment, cold as it was outside. And clear, with stars as bright as the strings of lights glinting on cables of the bridge you can see across the cemetery from this block.

He’d’ve seen that bridge from his window, as I could from mother’s room, on such a night: the sky even clearer than the glass that separated me—and him—from it. It’s so clear on such a night, whipped by the early winter winds that come before a storm. Two nights before Christmas, eight before the end of the year.

Buried, gone before New Year’s Day. Then the stoop where he sat, where he gave me little bottles of soda as he sighed, coughed and sometimes talked, that stoop disappeared under snow—the heaviest this block had ever seen, according to the weather reports. For days, for weeks, the snow lay stubbornly, not yielding to footprints.

Nobody came or went. Far as anybody knew, nobody—not another person, or even a cat or a dog—lived there. I don’t remember anyone exiting or leaving that house and I’m not sure anyone sat on that stoop when I wasn’t there with Adam.

Haven’t seen anybody on that stoop today, either. From what I’ve heard, people don’t do that anymore—in fact, nobody stops for very long on this block. Most of the time, the sidewalk’s vacant. When anybody walks, she doesn’t stop until she’s inside her house or off this block, headed to wherever else she’s going.

From what I hear, nobody’s sat or stood on that stoop since the last time I saw Adam. After the snow cleared, after the ice melted and the shadows that precede evenings were swept into extra minutes, then hours, of light at the end of the day, the bricks of that stoop and that house crinkled and started to come apart at the cement seams that held them together like stitches of winter coats at the end of the season, when the weather’s still cold enough to wear them but there’s enough light to show how worn they are. Someone came over to look at them, mark them. Then other men accompanied him, chipping, scraping and painting. I don’t know who those men were—nobody said, and Adam didn’t have any relatives anybody knew about—but they were there, it seemed, the first day the weather broke. In almost no time, they smothered the flaking red bricks with a sticky shine in the color of chewing gum.

52, Identities

 

So, as far as anybody on this block knows—if they ever know anything at all—that body found in the basement was mine. Or, at any rate, that of the person who bore the name I once had. Now that mother’s died, there’s nobody left on this block who remembers that person with that name. Only the body: If they’ve heard about anything, that’s it.

Just what I expected: Once the body’s gone, so’s the person. All of the people who could possibly remember any of the time I spent on this block are in this silent room now. And I have to wonder just how much they remember. Actually, I hope not much. That woman whose name I never knew did a double-take when I walked to the bathroom. But I don’t think—I’m not sure—she made a connection. Mrs. Littington didn’t seem to notice at all. She used to do that a lot—until she told mother she heard me using curse words or saw me smoke around her kids.

Maybe she’s recalling those times. Or she isn’t. Pas important, as she would say. She might’ve been looking my way, perhaps not. But somehow I don’t think she’ll ever recall me, mother or anybody in this room as soon as she leaves. As far as I know, there’s no reason why she should, for she never seemed to share even what little taste her husband had for telling amusing stories about all the places to which they’d gone and from which they’d come, like the people they met and left. When she talked about any place besides this block, or any person who wasn’t here, her eyes never met those of anyone standing or sitting within her vicinity. She might’ve been looking at someone—a member of her family, someone who lived in Toulon before the war, the aunt in Paris, one of the many expatriate Europeans she encounters in verandas and parlors misplaced throughout the world—and describe what she saw and what they said. As soon as she finished her monologue, her gaze disappeared and she returned to this block.

She’ll be gone soon; so, I hope, will I. She and the woman whose name I never knew don’t seem to recognize each other at all—actually, I think Mrs. Littington doesn’t remember her, and she won’t make any attempt to bring Mrs. L back to this block. For that, the lady whose name I never knew has my respect, if not my love-- were I capable of giving any.

Neither of them, none of us will be here tomorrow, any more than the body that was pulled out of that basement. The one that was supposed to be mine. The one that was too old—though no one but the medical examiner could’ve known—to be mine.

The body was removed; the body was moved. That’s the sequence believed and reiterated by the cops, reporters and everyone else who matched that body to the person they believed to be in it. No one’s name is ever mentioned; they are only signatures at the ends of reports. Police officers, medical examiner, coroner, undertaker—I’d guess there was an undertaker, or someone in charge of whatever rite followed the autopsy and all the rest, because he was buried in a cemetery: the same one into which we’re going to place mother’s body. The man who ran the place wouldn’t have it any other way, it seems: A religious—Catholic or Jewish—ceremony for the body’s death is required for entrance into the gates surrounding the rows of marble slabs. As far as I know, they don’t have vaults, urns or anything else for people who’ve been cremated, or for that matter, a tombstone that doesn’t have a cross or Magden David on it.

Enbalmed, with a clean suit or dress. Frozen in a moment that never existed, for eternity or posterity or whatever they want to call it. A moment that never was: the eternal present.

If the moment never existed, nor did the people who lived in—I mean, bodies that passed through—it. They can—will—would—no more accompany the body they’ve sealed against light, air and water than the person who inhabited will return to that time, to this block.

No more than mother will. Or he, or I. As long as someone thinks I was inside that body at the moment of its death, or that it had the same name I once had, it might be safe to stay here, on this block Or maybe not. But I know that if anybody asks the question—actually, any question—I’d have to go. Now I know why mother and the nuns and teachers I had didn’t want me to ask “too many questions.”

Where was I at the moment I was supposed to have died? Where is the person, the name, that once belonged to the body?

51. From The Ground

 

Even if nobody here recognizes me, even if none of them recall me from the days when I lived on this block, I’ve got to get away as soon as mother’s in the cemetery. She’s not going to be buried in the plots at either end of this neighborhood; nobody—at least nobody from this block—‘s been buried in them for a long time.

They all ended up under a lawn about an hour and a half’s drive away from here. White slabs blister the ground; on a bright summer day you have to squint to read them. Each one’s the same: name, date of birth, date of death. The only differences are that some slabs have crosses carved into them between the names and dates, while others’ names and dates are separated by the Magden David. If you grew up on this block, everybody you knew was Jewish or Catholic. You realized there were “Protestants;” later, Presbyterians and Baptists and such: all those Christians separated and converged, never speaking to each other unless forced to do so. Like the Hasidic and the Orthodox and Reformed Jews: If you grew up on this block, those are the distinctions you make between people.

And if I’d ended up in that graveyard, as mother soon will, they’d consider me Catholic, like her. It wouldn’t matter, really, how or where I died: Whether the blood was in my crotch or on my hands, it would be the same. Nor would it matter that she didn’t make me kneel next to my bed and pray every night, or even that she said nothing even though she knew that I’d stopped attending church not long after she ran out of money to send me to Catholic school.

But what would they make of me now? The cemetery isn’t religious, at least to my knowledge. It’s not like one of those Orthodox cemeteries that won’t take you if you get tattooed or pierced, or one of those Catholic burial grounds that doesn’t allow anyone in who’s “died in sin.” I never understood how they defined that one—after all, people who’ve killed are allowed in.

Maybe that’s what spooks people about cemeteries. The bones and flesh, if they aren’t already dust, are on their way to becoming that. They can’t hurt anyone. Actually, that’s the reason I never felt uncomfortable when I was alone with the tombstones at night. Maybe the “voices” people claim to hear, or the specters or whatever they claim to see, escaped like bottled genies from the ones who’ve been killed by the ones whose names and dates are etched in marble or granite.

Every cemetery, as best as I can tell, covers, with a blanket of amnesia, at least one person who’s killed someone else. Of course some of the killers were themselves murdered, and a person who doesn’t kill isn’t necessarily more innocent or noble than one who does.

Under some grassy plot, under some rocky piece of ground, in a vault—somewhere—lie what remains, if anything, of Adam. Wherever it is, I know it’s not a Catholic or Jewish cemetery. For all I know, he might be in the same ground as Adolph Eichmann or Martin Bormann. Actually, I know he’s sharing the same ground with his killers: It doesn’t matter if he’s in Jerusalem or Cracow or the same state as this block. He must be; he ran from Bergen-Belsen and ended up—on this block.

I started here. Adam ended up here. Mother started and ended here. For a long time, I thought life was one of those board games you played as a kid with other kids. In some of those games, you end up some place different from where you started. In others, the idea is to get back to the start. And some players, due to an unlucky roll of the dice or draw of the cards, don’t get much past the start or always end up there.

I know what I must—or at least want—to do: get away, as soon as possible. But I had no more choice, really, about coming back today than I did about which body I had when I was born. Maybe a similar fate will determine whether I get away. I hope not.

I know I must get away—at least to continue my life and culminate my transformation. But there is no other reason why I’m obligated to move: As far as I know, there’s no law of nature or psychology that says so. Not that I know much about such things. I only know that I must, only for the vision of myself to which I’ve become acquainted, and of which I’ve learned, through some process I can’t name.

People look like they’ve been doing double-takes, but no one’s asked me. That confusion—which could aid my escape or get me killed—is also, at least in part, a matter of fate.

My name—take that back, the name I had when I lived on this block—is on a tombstone in one of the cemeteries. This is not a metaphor: I saw it on my way here. My former name, a date of birth, a date of death—whose? The former, that of the person who carried that name. The latter, the date someone calculated after the body was examined, was ID’d—by whom? August 4, 1967- June 18, 1992.

Someone—who avoided indictment for a daughter’s murder, according to some people, only through a spouse’s ability to pay—once said, “Two people know who killed her: the killer and somebody the killer confided to.” Funny, how she could’ve been talking about that person whose tombstone has my former name and my date of birth etched into it. Not only is there the confider and confidant; there is someone who knew that body was older than the person who had my old name would’ve been on the date of death. Or that he would’ve had no more reason to be on the block than I would’ve had—or so it seemed.

Stranger still, no one seem have any record or recollection of who ID’d that body, even though it wasn’t so many years ago, not really. In fact, no one’s ever said how the cops or the coroner or whoever connected—pieced together—the name and body. Was it the wallet, the driver’s license, what? They don’t know when he showed up here, on this block, or why. And I can’t say how he ended up in the particular cemetery in which he’s buried.

And here’s something else nobody talks about openly, I’m sure (and, I’m equally sure, kids get slapped when they ask about it): They found the body, bled and bloated, on the concrete floor eight feet below the house. Lying on his side, hands zip-tied behind his back, gray duct tape over his mouth. And a clotted gash where his penis had been. That detail spread, the way any other truth somebody doesn’t want the children to know spreads through the neighborhood: by word of mouth. Except, nobody knows where the first kid who knew the story heard it.

I’m sure that she knew everything I’m recalling now. But she never said so. In fact, knowing her, I don’t know who, if anybody, she told. The lady whose name I never knew, maybe. And perhaps someone else. But not the police, I’m sure. I’ll bet she denied knowing who might’ve killed him, or his reasons for doing it.

And mother was one of those people nobody questioned—at least not openly. Nor would she question me, or anyone else, about that body in the basement. She never asked whether I was here or anywhere else near this block at the time he was killed. She didn’t have to; she just knew. And she’d’ve never told, at least anybody who’d want to know.

Some people would say she’s responsible for letting the killer get away. Not that they’d necessarily want the killer to be punished,  at least not much. A few people might’ve missed him—a few, but not many. Others who knew him probably cared about him the way his killer did.

So now mother’s going to that field out in the country, with soldiers and sailors and their wives and children. Her father’s there. I don’t know whether he was in “The War”—the one Adam mentioned —or any other. Mother didn’t talk about such things. And she won’t have to, ever. Hopefully, after she’s buried, I won’t have to either.

50. More Stories

 

I suppose mother’d’ve wanted this. Or at least she wouldn’t’ve railed against it. But me, a part of me still wants to rescue her from it, to protect her against it.

She wasn’t one to protest things as they are, or at least as she knew them. If anybody knew what hypocrites, criminals and pure-and-simple liars the priests and nuns were—and are—it was she. That some of them could collect money and spend it on everybody and everything but the poor and broken—she knew—she told me herself before I left this block. It didn’t—at least, I didn’t think it did—surprise her, years after the fact, when I told her that a priest tipped my hand when I poured wine into his chalice during mass or that in the vestibule behind the altar he insisted that I—and he helped me—remove more than my surplice and cassock I, like the other altar boys, wore over my school uniform when I was on the altar. Well, I didn’t hear surprise in her voice anyway—I told her over the phone, months after I left. I’d stayed in so many places by then that I can’t remember now where I was when I made that call.

I’m sure she also knew that some took their vows of celibacy no more seriously than they took their vows of poverty. Madge, whom I’d gotten to know about the time I realized that I’d sleep with a man only for money or in self-defense, told me about the convent she left. “They’re all alike,” she said. As a noviate, she’d also taken the vow of silence, and the Mother Superior enforced it, she said, “for your own good.”

If mother hadn’t known about such things, surely she wouldn’t’ve been surprised to find out. After all, what woman doesn’t know that all bonds that hold any community—whether a family, convent, school, church or any other organization I know of—all consist of some unspoken, unwritten code of silence enforced by economics, blackmail and/or outright physical force? Just about every woman—I include mother; I include her mother and their friends, and now I will include myself—has, at some time in her life, acquiesced to those codes, out of habit or necessity, or because she was unaware of any other option.

The men—or the women who’ve joined forces with them—who coerce, blackmail, beat or starve their daughters, sisters, wives and mothers—either haven’t any idea of what they’re doing or see it as part of their entitlement, their very existence. Even the most consciously benevolent of them fall into their habits around women and girls, and with their students, employees, parishioners and other charges.

Mother had to’ve known this. Why else would she’ve raised me only with occasional help from her mother, with no men anywhere in sight? But then again, she made no attempt—perhaps she wasn’t capable of such a thing—to find a more worthy man, or to turn the man who impregnated her with me into my father. Nor did she stray very far from the church. True, she went only on special holidays or when she felt the need to light a candle and say a prayer for someone, for something she hoped for. And, as I’ve said before, she sent me to Catholic school for as long as she could afford it. The church wasn’t willing to help the “bastard child” of a single woman. But as long as he paid, or someone paid, I was allowed to stay in their school.

And for all that she complained about how meaningless such things are, she arranged for a wake and funeral as traditional as this one for her own mother. I don’t think she’d’ve wanted it any other way, hypocrites and all.

But once I left this block, she never talked to me about church, unless I mentioned the things I’ve been thinking about. She never used that stale argument I heard from others: “Well, church is like anything else. Some people are good and some people abuse it.” Others—someone else—said that. But not mother.

But even after I realized there are hypocrites everywhere—that one was in bed with me, lying with another—I still hated the church and its ceremonies. Even after I learned how employers use sex and other forms of extortion in much the same ways as priests and teachers do, I still despised them, it, all of them, all of it.

Mother may’ve thought this frivolous but I can’t stand to hear any living being say “thee,” “thy” or “thou,” even in prayer. In fact, I can’t stand the “th” sound: It sounds like the fanning of a flame that would otherwise die, and should, after it’s burned the house and killed all the innocents in it. I never could stand that kind of pompous artificiality that echoes voices that have authority only because they’re repeated. I mean, there’s just no reason—at least no reason that I can see—to say what doesn’t need to be said to make meanings out of things that aren’t there.

In one of the last classes I attended, the teacher was quizzing us on a book with this sentence in it: There be the woods of Lo’thlrien…Let us hasten. If those words had been spoken or written by someone in King Arthur’s court, I could understand. But the person who wrote them had been a professor of the teacher who assigned it. That teacher—I’m forgetting his name now—was probably mother’s age, so the professor who hastened him him to the woods was—what, mother’s age, maybe a few years older. But not ancient or—What did he call it?—medieval.

I wonder if that teacher advised the person who wanted use The Village People’s In The Navy as a recruitment song. Maybe he’s the one who told Reagan to use Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA for his Presidential campaign. While neither of those songs has much to do with me or mother, they—especially Bruce’s lament—are at least relatable to some people who have lived and died on, or fled or been pulled away from, this block.

And all the prayers, epitaphs, eulogies and such have no more to do with mother’s life than the opening line of Tale of Two Cities. Not the best of times, not the worst of times. Only this moment. No heaven, no hell; no appeals to get her into one or keep her out of the other mean anything now. Only now—this moment—does. It’s all she had; it’s all I have; it’s all either or all of us could ever have.

In this moment, in any moment, I breathe, I wake, I wash, I dress, I drink, I eat, I leave, I come back, I leave again, I breathe, I hurt, I cry, I sleep, I wake again, I sleep again, one more time, for the last time. Any virtue some priest some other mourner, could attribute to mother means about as much as anything they could attach to me or anyone else. She lives; she’s dead. She died; she’s here now, on this block, where she and I began.

At least neither Mrs. Littington nor the lady whose name I never knew are trying to make a hero of her now. I won’t, either. Nor, do I suspect, will anyone else here—except for the priest who pleads some cause that didn’t need to be made before God or any living being. No one has to justify her life, her death or the passage between them any more—and I’ve only just understood this—than I have any obligation to explain the transition I’ve been making: the one whose outcome mother won’t witness. But then again, she doesn’t have to. I am the life she bore into this world—onto this block—and I’m here now as she’s leaving. And so are the others. They can talk, if they choose, about drinking each other’s coffee or what their kids and hers have become or gone to. But it all matters now about as much as the priest’s appeals to that to which he’s pledged his belief and fealty, or about as much as any story I can tell about the boy who confined me inside my body back before it’d ever left this block.

After today, I will never be able to speak of that one as a boy, or myself as a man, again. Nor can I tell anyone about the woman I will become, and the laws of this state will recognize, if I survive the operation.

49. Bodies

 

Two of the main streets that enclose this block—a Parkway and an Avenue—are named “Ocean.” Three thoroughfares—a Boulevard as well as a Parkway and an Avenue—are named “Bay.” And there are still other streets with “Ocean” or “Bay” in their names. Oh, and I mustn’t forget about the other streets that share their names with bodies of water that are found nowhere near this block.

I never connected the words “bay” or “ocean” with great basins of salt water. I still don’t, even though I finally got to taste the surf after I left this block. “Ocean” signified tides and winds only because some books, which I had to read for school, represented it that way. The same for “bay” and mirrors of moonlight rippled by breezes: that is how the books depicted such bodies of water. With Vivian, I hadn’t gone to the ocean; I’d gone to the beach and a town—a village, really—splintered like driftwood.

Where Bay meets Ocean, they couldn’t bury Adam. For some reason—the way he died, I was told—he wasn’t allowed into the Jewish cemetery there, at Bay and Ocean. He couldn’t be buried there—that’s what I’ve heard ever since. No one said he wouldn’t bury Adam there, only that he couldn’t be interred there.

He also couldn’t be buried in the other cemetery near this block, at Atlantic and Bay Bridge: It was Catholic; they wouldn’t have taken him either. One of the nuns—no, wait, it was a priest, who instructed me in I-forget-what before we made Confirmation—told us that the ground itself couldn’t take him, wouldn’t keep him, because it was sanctified, which was a fancy way of saying holy, which meant that they couldn’t keep him buried there.

Father—I forget his name—said it was because Adam killed himself. Same thing the rabbi said. Of course, neither of them talked to me or any of the other kids about him. We’d just heard what they said about him later on, one kid from another, though none of us knew who spoke first.

So they couldn’t bury Adam at Bay and Ocean or Atlantic and Bay Bridge because, they said, he’d killed himself. He couldn’t stay submerged like the bodies tossed by their killers at the beginning of winter. Those bodies stayed down, under the cunningly calm, cold surface, until the undercurrents warmed and lifted all things that wouldn’t wake for long, warm mornings to the light above the water.

When you grow up on this block, you learn at least this much: People don’t, by accident, end up at or in the water when they die. They’re always tossed, thrown, pushed, shoved or dropped in. Or, if they get to the water on their own, they die only after they’re held under, by themselves or somebody else.

I’ve never believed for a moment—oh, forget that, I’ve always known—that Adam’s death wasn’t what the priest, rabbi or everyone else on this block called it: a suicide. Whenever people from this block used that word in connection with Adam, they shifted their eyes from me and the word escaped from them, as if they’d sidestepped their own voices. And their echoes would drift away from that word,, creeping along like a ship that’s left its dock before its scheduled time and is slipping into fog.

48, What They Knew

 

Some things are the same everywhere. Including here. People’re always afraid of what’s not there, or here. And then—guess what?—it happens.

They’re all afraid we’ll leave: the ones who’ve no reason, no wish, to stay—even the ones who have to leave if they want to continue living at all. Yet there’s always a sense of betrayal—nobody wants to know you—in fact, some may even want to kill you—once you’ve left.

So we go. Anyone with any sense—like mother—doesn’t try to bring us back. She may’ve hoped for my return at one time, just maybe, but I think she knew it’d happen. Did she know what I’d done? Somehow I think she must’ve. How could she not’ve? How could anyone, including (especially) that woman whose name I never knew, not know? Somehow I guess Mrs. Littington knew, too. Or at least I expect that if she’d found out, it wouldn’t surprise her. Now would Adam’ve been shocked, I think.

Actually, mother understood that what’d been done to me was enough reason to leave. So would the things I’d witnessed or learned about. Like Adam’s death. If there’s any sort of existence after this one, and whoever’s there can, or wants to, look at this planet again, how could he not understand? After all, I think he wanted to get off this block as much as he wanted anything else, save perhaps for getting away from Bergen-Belsen.

And mother: If the heaven she believed in actually exists, she’s going there. Not because she was any more virtuous than anyone else—well, maybe she was, because for all that she might’ve said to the woman whose name I never knew, I’m sure she kept as many secrets as anyone I’ve ever known. If I know anything about the man who fathered me, or anybody else, it wasn’t because she told me. It’s because she knew.

But really, how could she not’ve known about the murder? Me and the murderer. Other people’ve been killed on this block, but that killing was the one nobody could deny they knew about. Not even mother. And especially not me.

I know this much: that none of the information. save for the date of death, was correct on the crime report, or on the death certificate. Some of the information was more or less accurate, like the time of death. They came upon a figure based on the amount of time it takes someone to bleed to death, or by some such method of computation. But the rest of the information—the name, the date of birth—none of it has anything to do with the person it was supposed to identify.

47. Nakedness

Somehow I always knew that if I’d ever seen the ocean, I couldn’t come back to this block. The sea was only three miles away, but I got my first glimpse of it from a plane. By then, I was far away from the beach where the Puerto Ricans and Blacks –but nobody from this block—went.

I had no idea what people looked like when they sunbathed, swam or simply fidgeted about on the sand. I’d seen pictures, heard stories about them, about waves that turned and spread their skin over sand. Nobody on my block went to the beach—not to that one, anyway.

Never could I understand why anyone would want to take off most of their clothes in front of total strangers. Or—especially—in front of people they lived with.

I can’t remember mother or I seeing each other without clothes. I’m sure she saw me, when I was a baby, perhaps in that part of my childhood that returns in dreams I don’t remember.

And mother: She must’ve known—or did she?—about the rape: she never made me strip. She didn’t even mention the calls the dean made—I know, I saw him—when a gym teacher sent me to the dean’s office because I wouldn’t go into the locker room and change my clothes. Oh, those nuns could be so unpredictable and sadistic. But, no matter how badly they treated us, they never made us take off our clothes.

I’ve since heard that in junior high or high schools everywhere, boys and girls go to their respective locker rooms and change from their pants or skirts and sweaters to T-shirts and shorts. And at the end of gym class, everyone takes off his or her gym clothes and showers. No way I wanted to shower in front of all those boys—or the gym teacher. And I told the dean so. And every week or so, after I’d spent a few days worth of gym classes in the dean’s office (or didn’t go to school at all), I’d be back, and the cycle would begin again.

I don’t know what mother told that dean or gym teacher. But, like I said, I never heard about it from her.

And the first time I saw the ocean, from a plane, I’d taken off only my shoes. In fact, I put on a jacket I carried with me—Why are planes so cold inside? By the time I saw the ocean for the first time, then, I didn’t have to think about or fear my own nakedness, for I had exposed my body—for money. They never looked, except perhaps for a moment, at my flesh. It was there for them to touch, grab, pull, for as long as they rented it.

At first, I didn’t understand what they were doing to me—I’d experienced it only in the basement of that abandoned house down the block, with Rob. Most of the customers were close to the age Rob was when he raped me. Though I experienced no pleasure—I wouldn’t’ve known what that felt like in my body—they were still somehow different from Rob, and not just because they paid.

They paid, and left me alone. They probably wouldn’t’ve known me in daylight, or acknowledged me if they did. They probably wouldn’t’ve looked at me even if I approached them stark naked and stopped them.

They probably would’ve ignored me on the beach, too. I wasn’t offering; they weren’t buying. Of course, they never would’ve gone to the beach near this block, or any one in this state, on this shore, for that matter.

One of them wanted to take me there. For pay, of course. It tried the litany of excuses: I didn’t know how to swim, I burned easily and my eyes and skin were really sensitive to sand. “It doesn’t matter,” he insisted. “But you must pay first,” I told him.

I set my fee, he paid and on the day of our scheduled rendez-vous, I was nowhere nearby, nowhere where he could find me. His fee was enough for the plane ticket. I had no idea of what I’d do when I got off the plane, but somehow that didn’t matter.

Getting that ticket was surprisingly easy. They ask where you’re going so they know how much to charge you; they don’t ask what you’re doing once you get there. You just go. And, in my case, it meant crossing the ocean, seeing the ocean. No one tried to get me to the beach, take off my clothes, not unless they were going to pay for it. Even then…

46. Destinies

I wonder whether mother ever had a moment when she knew, for that moment and all others in her life, exactly what she’d be. Mother. Could she’ve avoided it, changed it, ended her life or begun it again? Mother, another life on this block, for the moment, for every moment she, the woman whose name I never knew and the voices—I thought I’d escaped them, but I’m hearing them again—stayed here. Did she ever think it could or couldn’t’ve been any other way? In short, did she think she might or might not’ve had a choice.

I don’t remember her ever criticizing other people, or second-guessing the decisions they made. Not that they always made her happy—not that I always did so, I’m sure—or that she agreed with them.

How else could she’ve, for all the years that’ve just ended, kept herself from asking about the changes in my voice, or what the voice said? Perhaps she saw those transformations—part of the bigger, longer one in which I’m about to reach a major turning point—as inevitable. As I realized they were, one day.

Nothing’s as scary—no, terrifying, in the way of a near-death experience—as knowing exactly who and what you have no choice to become. Well, for some—like me, anyway—it’s traumatic in part because there’s no way to prepare for the experience or what you learn from it.

I realized, of course, that I’d do what I’ve been doing for the past few years. I had no vision of time: I could see myself as a woman in the present moment, but I knew that I might still be living as a man ten, twenty years hence. Gradual transformations—the prospect of them, anyway—generate more anxiety because it’s harder to see the stages than the end (at least, the end one hoped for or imagined) of such a journey.

I knew that I’d no choice but to “turn” female, though I had no idea of what or whom that would mean. My mother? Mrs. Littington? The lady whose name I never knew? The nuns?—oh, kill me first!

Wait a minute. None of them lived with men, I realized. (I don’t recall seeing Mr. Littington.) They didn’t have to have children who would be abandoned by the men who fathered them. They didn’t have to get fucked, literally and figuratively by men. Or did they? They still could be raped, after all, and have other people’s children.

Still, most of them lived in a world without the male race—except the ones they taught or raised. No men, and they were women. Only the children interrupted their cloistered calm. Now I know why nuns were so mean to kids!

Still, nobody’s ever been able to explain why Sister Martha O’Connan slapped Amy Deirian across the hand with a yardstick when she refused to—no, the truth is, she couldn’t—put her hand down for more than half hour. She grimaced, her skin turned red and she began to cry the lonely, desolate moan of someone who knows she’s not going to get help because nobody’s there to give it or even to explain what’s happening. Actually, there was one—Sister Martha—who could, but to this day, I don’t understand why she didn’t.

She struck Amy, who would’ve furled into a fetal shape if there hadn’t been a desktop between her head and knees. Tears dripped, slowly, like wax from a candlestick, down her fingers cupped over her face, which her arms propped on the desk across the aisle from mine. I glanced downward as the blood oozed from her seat to the floor and crept toward the book basket underneath my seat.

Through the ensuing weeks and months, other girls, some of whom snickered into the palms of their hands when Amy bled, would meet Amy in a corner of the playground at lunch time. First there was Melissa Farrington, a pale girl who was repeating the sixth grade because she missed two months of school the year before. Then Joanna Torres, a plump, dark girl who, according to the aunt who was raising her (One never heard about the parents or grandparents.) never “got into trouble” because she came directly home from school and wasn’t allowed out again unless she finished her homework before it got dark. Even for someone as dutiful as Joanna, such a feat was impossible, at least from some time around All Saint’s Day (when we were supposed to go to church) until Easter or thereabouts.

I wasn’t surprised when Stacy Sunnyfield joined them: She was always trying to win a popularity contest that nobody was running, at least not officially. But I saw, at a glance, that her face bore a more thoughtful, less calculating and expression and that she hardly talked at all.

Although nobody explained what she or the other girls in that new clique were doing, I knew somehow that Amy’s blood brought them together.

The following year—or maybe it was two years later—Joanna’d moved, or been moved, to some other relative, I don’t know where. All I know is that the relative was male because I heard he raped her. Abortion was out of the question, so she was moved again, to some other place. And neither I nor any of the other kids heard about her again.

By the time I left this block, not only Joanna, but also Stacy, already had children. Melissa didn’t only because getting fucked didn’t improve her health, as some smooth-skinned man twice her age promised. Amy was gone, too, but I never found out where she went…except to the yard, like the cemeteries on either side of this neighborhood, where everyone remained as I knew the: not safe, not immutable, but touched by nothing but the moon , which I am bound to follow.

That, by the way, is—at least as best as I can tell—the light of those few dreams I can remember. It’s like seeing shadows of moonlight during the day.

Back to those girls: Whenever a boy stood on their periphery or anywhere near it, at least one of the girls would flash the stare of someone who could kill or knew someone who would. A lot of men say they see that look on Sunday afternoons, when they take themselves away from the football game on TV long enough to go to the kitchen for a drink and they find their mothers, sisters, grandmothers and aunts gathered around the table as dinner simmers.

The only woman from whom I’ve ever gotten such a reaction was the one whose name I never knew, when she was talking with my mother. But I never encountered it, oddly enough, from those girls on the playground. I don’t think they liked me better than the other boys in the class. I take that back—Joanna did, or at least once she told me so. I stood, my head tilted slightly forward, like the girls who hadn’t yet entered their circle, but would.

The last time I tried to play basketball with the boys on the playground—because Father Byrnes, who taught catechism to those of use who were about to “become confirmed as soldiers of the Lord” said I should—Tom Rupett, my height and weight in solid muscle, flung the ball at the side of my head. When I fell, two other boys—maybe more—ran and threw punches at me. “We don’t want no sissy boys here,” one of them growled. “Yeah, go to the girls, where you belong,” snorted another.

By then, I knew better than to believe that one of the boys would pick me for his team or include me in their “parties,” which included everything from going to old Lenny’s store and helping themselves to whatever they wanted to fights with kids from other blocks, if I spent time by the court, played and started a conversation with one of the boys. I forget who told me that, and I’m not sure which was more misguided: that person’s method of making friends or his notion that I wanted to play basketball or any other game with those boys.

If that person—whomever he or she was—had known what I knew about myself at that moment, he or she probably would’ve tried as hard as I did to wish it away, forget about it, “train it out” of me or to deny it in some other way. After I left this block, I met people who left families whose members ridiculed, beat or tried to kill them when they realized there was no way to deny what was in their bones.

“If I know, everybody else must know.” I don’t remember where or when I heard or read that. But, recollecting those days one more time, before mother, I know they had to’ve known. At least some of them did, anyway. Mother, certainly—I can’t think of any other reason why she didn’t fight it, why she kept me in the kitchen. Possibly those girls—and the boys, too—knew. But, even if you believe in their God, how can you ask him to “say it ain’t so.”

I don’t know whether Adam knew my destiny, or whether knowing it would’ve stopped him from beckoning me over to his stoop to drink soda and listen to his stories. If he understood, he also would’ve understood that it couldn’t’ve been prayed away or exorcised in any other way. The woman, the girl in the chimeric embryo of a boy, or what appeared to be a boy: Could he’ve seen that? Or maybe—I know this is a wild guess, as Adam’s been dead a long time—he saw his own life in me. He couldn’t stay in the house in a Polish town to which he returned, he said, in his dreams—“but so different, like an accident let it.” Soldiers marched him and his family away; other soldiers burned it. And the synagogue where he had his bris, his bar mitzvah—it closed its doors forever because there wasn’t even a minyan—ten men—left in the town. Somehow the building survived a Nazi-ignited firestorm, he said. Or at least that’s what he heard. He never knew for sure, because he’d never gone back, as he knew he never would.

He once told me, “You leave. You don’t come back.” Somehow, in the way he said it—in that almost-British accent inflected with, I would learn later, the French vowels and German rhythms prewar Continental Europeans learned in gymnasium—told me, in its otherworldliness (at least in comparison to anybody else on this block) that “you” meant “me.”

45. Why We Cannot Reunite

 

Mother has now accomplished something I didn’t think she’d even try to do: For the first time in my life, I’m part of a reunion.

Or am I? I’m here with a bunch of other people who lived on this block and who—with the exception of that woman whose name I never knew—haven’t been here in many, many years.

So I suppose some people would call it a reunion. Except that we haven’t been reunited. We never will be because we were never joined, save for the fact of having lived on this block. Mother and the woman whose name I never knew never left and, as far as I know, never disconnected their relationship, which of course was a consequence of living on this block. They talked about things they never talked with anybody else, including me. Now that mother’s gone, I don’t know who else she’ll talk to, if anybody. Somehow I imagine she won’t have any reunions after today.

For that matter, I don’t know if I’ll ever have one. I didn’t graduate from any school or participate in any of those other rites of passage that seem to mark other people’s lives. No war, no marriage, no Manhattan Project. In fact, I haven’t stayed on any job or lived in any place long enough to develop a camaraderie with anyone.

Then again, I’ve been told that I’ll never develop such relationships, no matter how long I live or work with anyone. I wonder if he—my guidance counselor—ever knew about Louis’s rape, or that I knew about it. In any event, he made his judgment of me not long after it happened, which was not long before I stopped going to school for good.

Funny, though, how he never talked to me about staying in school. I remember another time when I had a conference with him—I forget exactly why, but I think it was about my always low-but-still-falling grades—when I told him I wouldn’t be around for very long. “I know,” he said.

I’d already made up my mind that I was getting out of that school the first chance I got, but I still don’t know whether that’s what he meant. He was known for giving his one-sentence assessments: “You’re not staying in this neighborhood” or “It’ll be the Army or jail for you.” Then, I’d’ve accepted either to get out of that school and off this block. But his most famous one-liner, which he bestowed on one of the cheerleaders, was, “See you at the reunion.”

If he’d told me that, I don’t know whether I would’ve heard it as a sentence or a challenge. A dare, maybe—and only because I’d already developed such a thorough contempt for the place and almost everyone in it, including him. Somehow, I don’t think anybody said, “He inspired me” after spending sessions with him in his office or, in his earlier years, his social studies classes. Then again, maybe he did inspire, or at least motivate, somebody for all I know. But there’s nobody I can point to and say, “He (or she) inspired me.”

Sometimes mother instructed. Other times she empathized. But inspired, no. Adam--as much as he tried (and as much as he could) cultivate a companionship with me-- never could’ve motivated me because I knew, even before he stuck his head in that oven, that I would never, in any way, become a man who resembled him. Then again, I never expected to become a man—or even get to where I am now, on the brink of my sexual reassignment surgery—because I’ve never seen anyone do that on this block.

For that matter, I never saw anybody become a woman, or grow or change in any significant way on this block. Of course, when we’re children, we can’t imagine our parents as children, no matter how many photos we see or stories we hear about them from that part of their lives. But my mother: it seemed that she had been born as she is, as my mother. As, in other words, the one I’d always known and will probably recollect for the rest of my life. I say “probably” instead of “will” simply because predicting the course of anything in my life has never been a talent or skill of mine.

And then—then what? I’ve never had any faith in any of the religions that entangled my mother and other people and purport to teach what happens in this life and show or warn us what happens after it. According to the nuns and the brother, in whose classes I sat for as long as mother could afford it, she and I’lll be together again—or at least we’ll re-encounter each other—if both of us lead moral or immoral lives. Or we’ll be together again for a while, then part and possibly reunite later on if one of us has to purge more than the other.

If I survive the operation—I expect to, though I may become someone I can’t imagine now—there’s no way, I think, we’ll be together again. I was sent to this planet male; according to the teachings I got, I can’t enter the kingdom female. Or that’s how it seems, anyway. As far as I know, my mother didn’t commit any sin deemed irredeemable by the old men who run the church. Then again, I never quite knew whether she’d been married to, or divorced, the one who fathered me. Well, I had his last name all through school, so I don’t know; I guess they were married. Then again, she never used his name, except to enroll me in school.

I never asked mother about him, about his name. In time—not much—I realized my situation was different from what was supposed to be and I came to my own ideas about how it came to be. I knew that, one way or another, they weren’t married for all the time I can remember. I didn’t need to know anything else, really.

Maybe that’s why I never had what most people think of as curiosity. When you learn what you need (or want) to know without asking questions, you don’t learn how to ask questions. And you never expect to learn the truth about anything, about anybody, by asking questions.

When you don’t expect to know anybody long enough to be curious or need to know, you lose the need and the desire to ask questions. You don’t wonder what will become of somebody, mainly because you don’t know whether you’ll survive long enough to find out. Or whether your life will be entangled with someone else’s for long enough so that any of it matters.

Then there’s no point to meeting somebody again five, ten twenty or however many years later. I read or heard, I’m not sure of which, that people who don’t go to their school reunions don’t form long-lasting relationships throughout their lives. Well, I guess I’m another ticker on that statistical table. Maybe I can’t predict the future, but I don’t expect to come back to this block again after we bury mother. For that matter, I don’t think anyone else—except for that woman whose name I never knew—will ever be on this block again.

I’ve the feeling I probably won’t be at another funeral, except my own, if anybody decides to have one. It doesn’t matter to me, and how could it once I’m gone? But I can’t speak for other people.

I expect—I didn’t say think, much less anticipate or predict—that barring some accident or disaster, no one who knows me will die before I undergo the operation to complete my transformation. So mother’s the last person to know me only by my current name, a label chosen for the vessel I’ve inhabited through these years. For a good many years, she’s heard my voice only over the phone. Still, it was the voice of the boy, the young man, she raised. As time went on, of course, I wasn’t as young or as much of a man as the one who inhabited her house, ate her and ate her food. Had she seen me, I’d’ve borne less and less resemblance to the one she birthed.

But, I guess she’d’ve recognized me. And that’s the reason why our relationship continued only over the telephone through the years. I know this; I stayed away because I didn’t want to be around anyone who’d recognize the boy, the man, I once was, even if they could see and understand who stood before them and what that person—I-- was becoming. For no one, including me, ever recognizes what is present. And there’s no way to reunite with it, and sometimes no way to connect with it in the first place.

44. Another Season

Perhaps that winter wasn’t any longer or colder than any of the others. Or it could be that people here needed to remember it that way. It’s amazing, the things people try to explain with it.

And it seems everyone has such a season. For my grandmother, it began the day her son—the brother (at least, I assume he was) mother never talked about, the uncle I never met—was born. I heard about him from my grandmother, and from other people. He died too young and far away, they said. He and a bunch of young men who died with him were memorialized, which is not to say remembered, with stones far away from this block.

What little that’s been recorded about his life didn’t include that winter, which had already begun by the time he was born and didn’t end—if it ever did—until some time long after the telegram, and what remained of him, came from Korea.

It didn’t end, either, when Adam bolted from that camp he would never name. (As best as I’ve been able to tell, it was Bergen-Belsen. What value does a name have, anyway, except that you can attach it to another name?) If there was a respite, it may’ve been been during the months he spent in a half-timber house far from any town the Allies or Nazis thought to be worth taking. Wind and snow swirled outside. It didn’t end when he got to this block.

In the logic of the TV programs I used to see and most movies and the novels they made us read in school, it somehow made perfect sense that Adam killed himself on the night before Christmas Eve. All the plot ingredients were there for preparation and consumption: impending holidays, a man alone who no longer believes (if he ever did) in God, or the gods—in other words, the hope for an end to suffering and defeat, and the promise that nothing would ever prolong his or any man or woman’s wait for it.

Of course, the logic of entertainment (however exalted its medium may be) has as much to do with life on this block as rises or falls in the exchange rate between the dollar and currencies or bars of gold no one on this block has ever seen. That logic has influenced life, or the liberty of anyone to pursue any pleasure to be derived from it, about as much as the life and death of an uncle I never met on some nameless hill in a country nobody on this block would’ve ever heard of otherwise. Why, his death couldn’t even end the winter my grandmother always talked about! It was hard; it was cold; it was coming and there was nothing anybody could do about it, she said.

In stories—like the ones I had to read for school—mourning ends when spring begins. If that were so, it’d make perfect sense that I was at mother’s funeral as winter draws near. So it’s also make sense Adam died on the night before Christmas Eve.

Somehow, though, it always seemed that whatever, whoever was lost with the early morning light was trapped, frozen in nebulous glaciers that didn’t retreat with the first rays of the equinox. Those skies, it seemed, simply moved further along like the rivers into which buds fell from trees.

43. The Colors of Other Storms

She never spoke of gathering clouds. Mother didn’t, either, but then she wasn’t one to speak about the weather.

I didn’t understand why until I saw it for myself. Of course, in her childhood home, Mrs. Littington sometimes wouldn’t see rain, or even clouds, for months at a time.

Every evening, the sun set wider and brighter behind trees that ringed the sea from her front yard, around a shoreline that arced like a boomerang back to the mountains she could see when she looked directly in front of her. For weeks, through August and September, and sometimes October, the sun—colored like the earth of the nearby hillsides—filled the waves with a power that burned foam away, leaving the most intense shade of azur—too much for the bluest of eyes, accustomed as they are to the flat colors, interrupted only by splashes of white, of the northern oceans.

She was right. I had to see that to understand why the part of the world where she grew up—even the gray city, Toulon, that she knew, where ships drifted away and disappeared beyond waves: ships heavy with their freight of secrets—is called the Cote d’Azur. The sea, the sky, at night or during the day, do not turn into shades of black or gray. Under the moon, nothing does.

And so even in Toulon, gray and gritty even before the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on it, the passage of days, of lives, happens through intensifying shades of blue and rose turning to orange, and back.

She remembered the day she left. It was close to evening. Blue hues deepened, as if the sea had engulfed the sun but couldn’t put it out. Instead, the sun refracted the depths of the sea through the stars and under bristles of cedar trees.

There was not darkness, no blankets of clouds: only more color, more intense and consuming hues, than even her eyes, which were accustomed to months of sun followed by months of rain, could take. Or take with her, she said.

Still, she never complained about this block, even though she wouldn’t’ve stayed any longer than she had to. Summer heat-- not light-- blinded people here: It led the eye to cracks in faded bricks. So did the clouds: layers of reflections of the shingles and windows of the houses here.

On this block, the clear blue sky—on those rare occasions when we really had one—suspends time, freezes motions—even those of the face—like a moments recollected from dreams. On the other hand, time, at least in every story I’ve heard or read, marches and gathers like the bodies of water that become storm clouds.

That’s how it is; that’s how it was—except in Adam’s stories. Or in Mrs. Littington’s, though she hardly ever told them. I don’t remember when I heard them: I don’t think she would’ve told my mother—or maybe she did, once or twice. But mother wasn’t interested in hearing about any other time or place but the one she was in. She’d’ve never understood what Mrs. Littington might’ve had to say about this place; she had no interest in Mrs. Littington’s Cote d’Azur or prewar Europe, for she’d never been, and never would be, any place but here.

And, through all those years we’ve spoken over the phone, mother never asked where I was: only that I had some place to say and something to eat. The sun from the Mediterranean, the wind down the Rhone—nothing like those things would’ve mattered to her.