Fell of Dark (12 page)

Faces

I SEE FACES ALL
over the place. In dust on windowpanes, in carpets, plaster, and the branches of trees, in the folds of clothes thrown onto the back of a chair. A man's death mask—open mouth, bullet hole in his forehead—shows up in the layers of a stone I keep in my pocket. I have a frowning man in a fingerprint.

Once I saw your face in my breath. It was a February night under a streetlight. I can't count how many times since then I've looked for you in the mist.

I spent a lot of time this morning making faces in the bathroom mirror. I was supposed to be showering, but I'd just read about
grimaciers
in one of my father's books.
Grimaciers
were French performers who put on performances of facial expressions in the eighteenth century. I stood in front of the mirror and twisted my face and closed one eye. I used my fingers to stretch my mouth and stick out my tongue, and I opened my eyes as wide as they could go. I pinched my eyes and pulled my hair. I pushed my nose flat, I plugged my nostrils, and I let my mouth do what it wanted. I did this so long I started turning into animals. The animals didn't exist in real life. My skin turned colors. I got hairy, furry, and patterns came up. More than once, my teeth became fangs. A few times, I had a trunk and horns. My eyes turned colors, and I barked and laughed.

I'll tell you what made me stop. I made a face that reminded me of my father, but my face was not really mine or his, and I thought,
That's what he looked like when he died, when the bumper of a car crushed his head.
Purple and his eyes backward, showing white, and his tongue rolling three feet out of his mouth.

New Year

1. Keep up the Latin
   
2. Read the Four Gospels
   
3. Write, read, think
   
4. Row
   
5. Discover my purpose
   

I'm always resolved to find you. We won't find each other until we find each other, but I keep an eye open. I search all the time.

Fantasy

THE BATHTUB FILLS UP,
and you stand at the window. A snowstorm clobbers the world.

An icicle hangs from the roof. It's thicker than your fist at the top and as long as your arm. The winter tooth scares you. If it broke off and struck a person, it would go through bone. You look from the point of the icicle to the ground twenty feet below. A person would have to be standing in the hedge for the icicle to hit. You test the water with your fingers and turn off the faucet. You settle up to your neck and watch the clouds pass.

In this bathroom, you hold the sponge to your nose and smell my mother's brand of black soap, which was my father's. How long can you think about a sponge? How many times can you squeeze a wet sponge and watch the spill wind around your wrist, forearm, elbow, and biceps?

Headache

THE PAIN IN MY
head. The skinny knife, and the hammer and nails. The lights of an enormous city pressed into my left eye, and the green aurora borealis rolling past.

Pain has no language other than growls or grunts. A headache for four days.

Nature

ALL THE MIRACLES OF
nature I miss. All the miracles I catch.

My mother cracked an egg this morning and cried out. The egg had the beginning of a chick in it.

An ancient fruit tree of some kind, an apple or cherry, grows in the park a little way from here. Every March, it blooms. Ten thousand pink and white flowers bloom and shake for a week. Then, all the flowers fall, and for a while the tree stands in its own memories. Last week, I went to look at the tree in bloom. I stood under it while the blossoms fell all around. I couldn't begin to understand what held me in place, or if it would ever let me go. I know you're like this tree. What will happen to me when I hear your voice?

Apartment

I'LL TELL YOU SOMETHING
that's true. When you come into this apartment, you can stand in any room, reach out your arm, and put your hand on a book or magazine. It might not always be in English. It might be in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Irish, Chinese, or Russian. We have something in Dutch and something in Albanian, and something in a language I can't even guess at. Basque, maybe, or Elvish. This shouldn't matter to me, or to anyone, since it's still text. If I look close enough at the symbols, I can make out a story, a poem, or a true fact. Almost all the books are in English.

You'd be amazed. Right now, in a rack behind the bathroom door, there's a book of political cartoons; a biblical concordance; the
New Yorker Book of Dog Cartoons
;
Getting Even
, by Woody Allen; and a book of math puzzles. There are stacks of books everywhere, and the shelves where books live are all bowed. They'll collapse at some point.

Maeterlinck,
The Treasure of the Humble
, 1899; Westcott, Cynthia,
The Gardener's Bug Book
; Kurlansky, Mark,
Cod
; Voltaire,
Candide
; Williams, Margery,
The Velveteen Rabbit
; Neely, Henry M.,
A Primer for Star-Gazers
;
The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats,
Volume 1; Phillips, Mark, and Jon Chappell,
Guitar for Dummies
, 2nd edition; White, Carolyn,
A History of Irish Fairies
; Goldman, William,
The Princess Bride
; Elder, George R.,
The Body: An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism
, Volume 2; Dahl, Roald,
James and the Giant Peach
; Thomas, Dylan,
Under Milk Wood
, London, J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1956; Joyce, James,
Dubliners
; Lagerkvist, Par,
The Dwarf
; Kawabata, Yasunari,
The Master of Go
; Shakespeare,
The Sonnets
; Wodehouse, P. G.,
Right Ho, Jeeves!
;
National Geographic World Atlas,
8th edition;
1000 Years of Irish Poetry
; all of Agatha Christie, and an armful of Asimov.

This is how I'm growing up.

I know my mother never stopped buying books after my father died. It was his passion, I think, though my mother's a reader, too. She told me he would come home with boxes of books from library sales or garage sales, and he would sit up until all hours, reading the books, picking at them. Most he would keep; some he would give away again. “Such a mess,” she said once. “But you ate them, too.”

I was born with a book in my hand, she said. The haiku of Basho.

Now I see her face,

the old woman abandoned,

the moon her only companion

Or:

In the moonlight a worm

silently

drills through a chestnut

I see the silent worm. It's like the wiggly, slippery thought that keeps me awake, right? I want to sleep but I can't. Worm. Worm.

And who is that old woman? She's a real woman, but she's also the old woman inside me who will be left by everyone. Why won't she die? Tick, tick, tick, tick. She's a watch that won't stop ticking, and she has to go on when all the other watches have died.

Purpose

THE REASON I'M ALIVE
at all. How am I supposed to know? Only God knows. Maybe you know.

Maybe I'm meant to build bridges, cut tumors out of the brains of children, or find stars in the folds of space. I sometimes wonder if I'll die a hero, protecting the world or just one person from death, from fire or murder. Why else do I bleed if not for something big and rare? I look deeper, get quieter, trying to find what makes me want to live.

Confessions

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS
and the Seven Princes of Hell: Mammon, the demon of greed; Belphegor, the demon of sloth; Satan, the demon of anger; Beelzebub, the demon of gluttony; Lucifer, the demon of pride; Asmodeus, the demon of lust; and Leviathan, the demon of envy.

I think the money in another person's pocket is meant to be in mine.

Last week, a woman dropped her wallet on the sidewalk. I picked it up, and I wanted to take her money.

When I think of myself as a grown man, if I haven't made the vow of poverty, I'll live in a house where I can sit in an armchair looking over the world through a wide, wide window. I will listen to music playing from a very expensive stereo. I might want to make money without working. I'd own a big luxury car, one of those British kinds, a Bentley or Rolls-Royce, which would be like driving around in my living room.

Mammon rubs his hands.

I want to confess to the things that make me cry. I don't have to say why they make me cry. They just do. Music. Beauty. My headaches. Poverty. The hungry. The sick and crippled. The bullied. The grieving. The raped and murdered. My mother's loneliness. The impossibility of you. Haven't I made you up?

These things beat me up. They make me bleed, and they bruise me. My body hurts. Some days, because of all the pain, I beg my mother to let me stay in bed. I won't go to school. I won't get up until after noon. My body hurts. I know my legs will break if I try to stand. So I stay in bed, thinking, not even reading. I write poems. I cry. I sleep. I become one with the bed, rooted. I'm a sort of mushroom.

I've wanted to kill myself.

I can hear the crying, soothing Belphegor who lies down next to me and holds my eyes shut.

I want to confess to the things that make me angry. The men who stare at my mother like she's a steak dinner. Car horns. Sirens. Crowds. Going to school, even though I can basically do what I want when I'm there. The fact I cry so easily. Physical pain. My bleeding and my hidden purpose.

I get angry if I have to stand in line for any reason. Angry at people who leave their dogs tied up outside no matter what the weather is. Angry in the heat. Angry when people litter. Angry if I have to answer the phone while my cereal gets soggy in milk.

I get mad at babies who cry, but I also get mad at babies who laugh. Barking dogs. Lawn mowers. Leaf blowers. Current events. Past events. Future events, like the end of the world when our sun finally gets tired of it all and explodes.

It's bad enough I get angry at so much. I'm sure it's more. It's how big my anger gets. Sometimes, it takes up all of me. My bones are made of anger, my veins and arteries, my eyes, my brain, my organs. Am I made from anger? It seems bigger than me, twice as big as me, and I want to crumple everything into a little ball, including myself, and throw it away. Satan commands it.

I've been known to eat until I make myself sick. I drink a gallon of milk every two days. I eat cereal by the bushel. I eat and eat and drink and drink. The whole time, Beelzebub snorts and burps.

Lucifer stands behind me. I have more intelligence, talent, physical strength, height, and speed than any other boy my age. You will know me as a king, a kind of god, able to do anything, think anything. Erik.

I can do anything except ask a girl out. So, Asmodeus, constantly licking his lips, and I have to watch Gemma Burns from far away. Her beauty and body make me dark, almost angry, and she stands under the arm of a false king, Sam McHugh.

Gemma isn't you. I know it. But I want Gemma to be mine, and for Sam to turn to sand. Green Leviathan roars.