34. Destinies of Choice

She doesn’t know I’m here now. I’ve never believed in ghosts, spirits or anything that’d wander whatever someone’d just left. I’m not saying there’s no existence after or before this one, and I’d never argue with someone who believes in reincarnation. But I’ve never experienced déjà vu as far as I know, and for that matter I’ve never had any wish to find out that I inhabited someone else’s body in Ancient Greece or some village just outside the farm where my great-grandfather was born. It would’ve been useless information to me—actually, very few facts and almost none of the ideas I’ve encountered could’ve changed the course of my actions.

Yes, my actions. I won’t try to explain them as the results of any other person’s actions or words, or any other force outside my own body. I killed. Yes, I killed. I could’ve claimed self-defense but I never have; I don’t expect to. None of it matters anyway: Nothing has changed the fact that someone is dead. Someone, perhaps the state, could’ve imprisoned, tortured or killed (Don’t you love that euphemism: Execute?) me, but it wouldn’t’ve brought him back or made his family—actually, his mother—whole again.

Anyone who’s ever taught—In fact, anybody who’s had as much time as I’ve had to see people from the other side of one-way mirrors—knows that the fear, the anticipation of punishment doesn’t cause someone to reconsider the action he or she is about to take; the actual punishment, once the act is done, is useless. It didn’t take long for me to realize that whatever ostracism, whatever abuse, I might run up against for killing him wouldn’t change the fact that he’s gone, that other people knew—or simply believed, which on this block is the same thing—that I’d aborted, cut down, short-timed, snuffed out, or whatever descriptive phrase they used to avoid saying “killed,” someone they might’ve treated even worse than they treated me.

So it’s not even a matter of how or who you kill, whether the victim was intended or not, a friend or an enemy, or a relation of any kind: I’ve paused longer for the deaths of people I’ve never met, or of whom I’d never heard except for their deaths, than for the one whose life I terminated. Even the death of Mother Teresa, whose work I always detested, left a hole in me no one else could and that couldn’t be filled with anybody or anything else. Some people can’t, won’t or don’t mourn their own fathers; others dissolve like rainclouds over the loss of a non-sentient being.

I’ll admit some guilt: I never stopped to grieve my father. The fact that he wasn’t there for me to grieve doesn’t explain or rationalize my lapse any more than necessity, whatever that may be, excuses my killing.

Of course he knew, if only for a moment, that when I had the power of life and death over him, I made the only choice, consciously or not, that could hold any meaning for him. Our lives did not intersect, as some would say: They never could have. Instead, he existed on one side of an opaque window. I began on the other side. Nothing in the life he lived has changed, or will be changed, by actions I or someone else have taken since his death.

So why, then, did I attend her funeral. She’d never know I was there; even if she did, she might not’ve recognized me. No, not even she—she’d only see what was, who was, in a moment called the present only because nobody’d yet decided what to call it, in a new suit of clothes—or at least something she’d never seen me wear before.

She, as much as anyone else could, or at least would, see someone who hadn’t killed—not even a “yet” attached to my story. I would not be the one who left, who ran. I’d still be that child who crept by the door and peeked through the window when she didn’t want me to know what she’d seen or heard outside. To her, I’d still be the one who wasn’t supposed to know the truth about Adam’s death—about Death—years after poking my nose through a curtain and lifting a slat of the Venetian blind. I still wasn’t supposed to know, or at least let on that I knew.

I’m sure she knew—Mother wasn’t stupid—but somehow I never wanted to tell. I never wanted to disillusion her. And what is disillusionment but the loss of one’s prerogative not to know that his or her life up to that point was an illusion, a dream. So what did I do but keep up one last illusion, even though she wasn’t there to notice.

Even though I knew it wouldn’t make any difference, I went to her wake and funeral out of respect for what I perceived to be her wishes. She’d’ve wanted me there, I told myself. And still tell myself. Me—or at least a memory of me—that’s who was in that room, along with my memory of her. Of course nobody goes to a funeral to remember: One only transports and transposes a memory of someone onto the corpse in the coffin. I couldn’t see her any more than she could see me. But nothing has ever seemed more imperative to me than to stand before that amalgam of wishes, dreams and fevers, frozen in an embalmer’s moment, encased in silk from the neck down.

I lied to her, disobeyed her, even stole from her, though I see now there are some things even I couldn’t’ve taken from her. Her half-hearted attempts to inculcate me with a faith she never questioned but never really believed did not take. Her more serious efforts to instill conventionally correct notions of sexuality and family in me proved even more fruitless.

I repeat, I’ve never been free from hypocrisy; probably never will be. I want to honor feelings my mother had now that she can no longer have them. For years, many years, whenever we could’ve gotten together, I made some excuse or found another obligation. Or I simply managed to be in some remote part of the world with no convenient way of getting back to this block to see her. Certainly we didn’t abandon any thought of each other: through all those years, we talked every week, usually on Sundays. She could sense, over the phone, that I’d changed, that I was changing. She’d never mention the differences she’d noticed in the pitch of my voice or the speed of my speech. She’d simply demand, almost plead, “Is everything OK?” How could she not know that I was trying to comfort her, or at least not worry her, with my evasions: “Yeah,” “Could complain, but won’t.”

Everyone learns not to tell a parent what he or she already knows, or at least believes. I learned that lesson after I’d been away a few years, when I told her I’d smoked back in the days on the block. I’d never again reveal what she never want to know. Not married, no kids—“You just haven’t met the right girl yet. Some day, maybe.” Right, mother. “You’ll find your calling, your purpose.” Of course, I’d never tell her I wanted any such thing, or believed anyone had one.

There was only one thing I ever wanted—myself, now, becoming. I killed only because I thought it’d bring me to the one I know now, who would never know him. And she would never know me in this moment any more than the women—There were only women—at her funeral knew me, or would know me.

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.

32. What They Say

Something’s making sense now. Actually, a few things, all of them having to do with why I left this block and won’t come back—at least I don’t expect to—once I’ve buried mother.

I’m seeing now they’re all related—or at least I can explain them in the same way I never expected this. I think I understand now why I don’t watch TV or read newspapers or magazines, or why I hardly ever read novels. And why I don’t think I could ever develop a taste for opera, or most theatre. True, I’ve been to only one opera: something about a girl who kills herself when her parents forbid her from seeing the boy she thinks she’s in love with.

And I’ve been to a few plays, of which I now remember only two: The Tempest and Macbeth. They’re the only plays I’ve ever really liked, and I’ve read them a few times even though I never learned how when I was in school. But the productions I saw of those two Shakespeare plays got them wrong in the same ways most teachers do. One made Lady Macbeth into Cruella de Ville without the 101 Dalmations; the other showed Caliban as a slave (and Prospero as a slave master) with frilly collars. As for Lady Macbeth, there had to be something more than wanting her husband to become king so she could enjoy the spoils to her if she stopped herself from killing the king when she had the chance because he, in his sleep, reminded her of her father. The production I saw left that scene out! And Caliban—I mean, what can I say for a character who is trapped in the wrong body, who says, “You have taught me language, and the profit on’t is, I can curse”? You learn, you get an education, you understand, you explain, and what does it get you? There’s no escape, my friend, as Adam would say. No escape from this block, from my mind, from my bones. In the production I saw, that line sounded great; so did his “The Isle Is Full of Noises” speech. Yet—maybe this was the actor’s fault—it didn’t sound right coming from him, as it does when you read the play.

The other plays I’ve seen, I don’t remember at all, not even how I came to see them. Someone might tell me that it’s unfair, based only on those plays and that one opera, to write off all the others.

Which isn’t what I’m doing. I simply have no need for any of the others, or for newspapers, magazines or TV. (When I hear “TV,” I think of what many people think I am and will be until my surgery is complete.) And, for the same reason—I realize this just now—I’ve never had any affinity for children or anyone much younger, chronologically or emotionally, than me. This, of course, rules out almost any male I’ve ever met and most folks who fancy themselves as artists.

And my explanation, I’ve just come up with it. It’s something Adam might’ve told me if I’d been a bit—actually, quite a bit—older. It’s something mother might’ve told me if she could’ve expressed it. Then again, she couldn’t’ve, unless she’d gotten off this block. Here it is: A fish, even one who’s learned to talk, could never tell you it’s in water. Take the fish out of its element and it dies. But to tell anybody where you’ve lived, or what you’ve lived in, you have to get away from it.

And what I just realized now—The reason why I’ve never tried to describe mother, Adam, Mrs. Littington, the woman whose name I never knew or any of the other people who lived on this block, who stayed, who left, who were driven away, is this: Tragedy is romantic only when you’re not going through it. The dead can’t aggrandize their sacrifices or mourn their mistakes. People who never knew there were any other paths besides the ones they followed can’t trouble themselves over the turns they took; women who know only bearing and rearing children, and men who know only how to beat, leave or forget them never tell stories—not their own or anyone else’s. Some may simply tell people they know, which is not really the same thing.

So I don’t need—or want—those contrived tragedies about star-crossed young lovers. If Adam’d made movies, Sophie’s Choice wouldn’t’ve been one of them any more than the boys who fight each other , beat the other boys who couldn’t fight them, harassed and raped the girls—and me—could’ve come up with another West Side Story. One was more than this world ever need; I say the same for Sophie’s Choice or anything that’s been written, sung, acted or made about people dying in flash of glory and youth. Even the least intelligent women I’ve met know better than that; almost no man does, or can. Adam was one of the few exceptions I’ve ever known—perhaps the only one.

Now I realize why cemeteries don’t disturb me—why, in fact, I feel more comfortable in them than almost anywhere else. And why one was the first place I visited when I got back to this block, and was in fact the only place I could’ve gone to before I came to the funeral parlor, the only other place to which I could’ve come back on this block. No one can inflate, deflate or conflate, much less exaggerate, the bones inside the boxes there. The dry ground is blistered with white slabs etched with the years, the dates of births and deaths of the ones who’ve become them when there was nobody to remember their names. Some bear crosses, others the Magden David; most of them, in the final hours before they turned to numbers and months in limestone, professed—if they hadn’t already—faith in God, Yahweh, Allah, Ha’Shem or one of the other 99 names of the being who remembered the one thing they took from the cradle to the casket: what their mothers called them. Everything else—including the lives to which they gave birth of from which they took one additional breath—decomposes before their bones. And they had only names: their own and one of the ones in which I—and sometimes they—never learned to believe.

And once I bury my mother—when I leave this block for the last time, I expect—I’ll have no more reason to use the name she (Or was it the man who fathered me?) gave me or the one her father left her with.

The graveyard at the end of the block furthest from my mother’s place was the one place where I knew I wouldn’t see or hear misconceptions, distortions or outright lies. Or so I thought until I saw a tombstone with these dates, August 5, 1967—June 18, 1992, under a name—whose? I’d heard it before; it was even mentioned when people spoke about me or my mother. My first name—my old one—no middle name (like me) but not the same surname mother and I shared.

The date of death: the last day I spent on this block. Cold and rainy; there were always days like that just before the summer officially arrived but after a heat wave that came too early for the season. I was on this block and nobody—except for one person, who wasn’t my mother—knew about it. At leas I don’t think mother knew: She never mentioned it.

But the birth date: Where did that come from? It didn’t belong to anybody I knew—too late to’ve been mother’s, much less Adam’s. And it’s more than two years before Adam’s death, the date of which I never could forget: December 23, 1969.

I recall some of these times: the summer when it seemed that all the boys that were too old for high school but too young for just about anything else disappeared from this block. And another man, whom I’d seen before, appeared. He wanted something—I didn’t know what—from mother, which I didn’t think she gave. And I was glad about that.

Mother’d never tell me who he was. She’d only snap, “You’re asking too many questions!” When he wasn’t staring at mother, he was gazing at me, especially at parts of my body I couldn’t understand why he wanted to see. Why did he peek through the peephole when I peed? Or stand by the bathroom door while I changed from my school uniform into dungarees?

One drizzly overcast afternoon, he’d somehow gotten in the house. I don’t remember hearing a knock, a ring or him arguing with mother. I heard the door click. Usually, it meant mother, but somehow I knew that day it wasn’t.

Before I could scream, he clamped his hand over my mouth and unbuttoned my jeans. “Tell your mother and I’ll kill you!” he rasped.

And on that last day on this block—the one mother doesn’t know about, I over to the cellar of a house just down the block from the one where mother and I lived. People my mother once knew were no longer living there, nor was anybody else. When he was inside, I crept down to dust and a ray of haze that entered the broken glass of the portal.

“Freeze!” He did.

“Don’t turn around. “ He didn’t.

“Put your hands behind your head!’

“Don’t say a word.”