“Okay,” I said. Such was my lot, apparently, thanks to Bond Fucker.
Feeling apocalyptic, I took a story and threw it out the window. It was called “Two,” and it was written by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
I
RONICALLY, AND YET
naturally—since we are often connected to each other by chance, wish, design, task, fate, aesthetics, fear, antiques, stamp-collecting, faux cheese for vegans, technology, horses, Turkmenistan, and gout—Jeff’s son Freddy had gotten a release job working garbage detail, and it was through this path that he got hold of that same discarded story.
In the Yiddish world, Isaac Bashevis Singer was not called Singer. He was called Bashevis
.
Had it been up to the Yiddish readers to select their own choice for the Nobel Prize, they would have preferred his brother, I.J. Singer. In Yiddish, when you say
Singer
, you mean the brother. Odd, isn’t it? How defenseless minor languages must tolerate the selection of their representative heroes by the Swedish Academy. I.J. wrote long, epic Russian-style novels in Yiddish about such serious topics as the industrialization of Lodz. They were filled with characters: gamblers, prostitutes, laborers, bosses, the religious, the antireligious, and the dark soot streaming out of the factories’ chimneys. Some Yiddishists believed that Bashevis got the Nobel Prize because he wrote about sex, something the
goyim
seem to love.
Freddy, knowing none of this, adored the story “Two.” He read it over and over again, carrying its tattered pages in the front pocket of his no-label pants. It was the kind of dream that only a found story, floating through the air over a pile of garbage, can bring to a man just out of the Tank. Its entrance into his New Life gestured toward some possibility of justice buried deeply within fate.
In this story, two boys studied together on the same bench, sharing one volume. It was a romance.
Together they came across an Ecclesiastical phrase. The rough cloth of their trousers serenaded each other’s thighs as they contemplated meaning on a smooth wooden slab. In this manner, they learned sensual experience and intellectual perplexity at the same moment. They fell in love, and therefore had to flee to a faraway land. Nothing bad had happened to them yet, but they knew that it would. They had to flee their true homes and then misrepresent themselves in their new home to avoid an inevitable degradation.
Later, the very people who had originated the threat claimed they had never done anything to hurt these boys. And, somehow, sneakily, that was true. They were brilliant, these people. They managed to enforce a thorough condition of deviance on the lads. One so complete that it required their anonymity, exile, and humiliation. And yet, the perpetrators never had to carry out any of the understood threat. In other words, their hands were clean while the job got done.
The race is not to the swift.
That was the biblical phrase that bonded these lovers. They discovered it together, at the same time, holding one book on two laps.
Other, more protected classmates interpreted those words to mean that a goal can be attained equally through slow steady preparation and caution as it can through speed. They thought this in the standard way that protected people miss all subtlety.
The boys, however, knew otherwise. They agreed, soft heads together over a crumbling book, that the phrase had a far more sinister meaning.
You see, they had been punished, but they had not done anything wrong.
As a result, they knew for a fact that there was no justice.
This gave them knowledge that the unpunished did not possess.
They knew that the most qualified is not necessarily the most recognized. And that if he is the most recognized, it may not be because of his qualification. It may be because of who he knows, his skills being of secondary consideration. He may just be the right caste. A born winner. Even if he’s not really good enough.
In other words, the fastest may not win the race, even though he is the fastest. The less skilled may reap the reward. And their winning may mean nothing about merit.
A-ha!
The boys took this phrase as a confirmation of a profound, unmovable corruption at the center of social life. That was why they knew to flee.
When they settled in their new faraway home, one passed as a woman. This was to avoid more punishment. When she accidentally died, thirty years later, by slipping on a wet tile and cracking her skull against the floor of the mikva, the villagers realized that she was a man. And being villagers, they sought out his lover and murdered him. The villagers thought this was appropriate. Then both bodies were thrown outside of the cemetery walls to rot.
F
REDDY PUT DOWN
this story. Sadly, he had to return to the reality of life outside those pages. But something inside him had been stirred.
Unlike the boys, Freddy was not a homosexual. But he longed for unity with another man, his brother. He wished they could run away together and share everything.
And he saw the arrival of “Two” into his life as a positive omen, because this was the very day that he and his brother Dominick were graduating from the halfway house.
The truth of the matter was that Dominick was the real junkie. He was the one who had the brain chemistry requiring more and more dope. Freddy just wanted to be with him, so he went along with it. Freddy took the minimal amount of narcotics necessary to keep the two of them together. But, actually, he didn’t need drugs one way or the other. He just needed a brother.
This is why the story “Two” affected Freddy so deeply. Once someone has been kicked out of society, they are forced into a situation that may not be safe. That consequence was part of the punishment.
The boys in Singer’s story had been together for thirty years. Isn’t that much too long for any romantic relationship to remain healthy? What if it is with your own brother? That’s for life, right? Freddy was pretty sure that if the two boys in the story got sick of each other, there would be no way out. The shitty other people had trapped them inside a mutual box.
Oh God, there he goes in that dress again
, one of them probably thought about the other. But still they could not separate. Why exactly? It would involve some kind of pretending about all they had suffered. That it didn’t bond them when it did.
People were allowed to feel things in books that they could never feel in real life. If you even tried in real life to approximate the feelings found in a book, someone would object. But actual people wrote those books, right? Where were they? Freddy didn’t know. He just wanted some understanding.
For example, in a book, two people are having an argument. One says,
“I’m leaving!” and heads for the door.
The other says, “Wait!”
The first stops and waits. He hears what the other is saying and realizes that they belong together after all.
In real life, whenever he was in this situation, Freddy would yell “Wait!”
But the person would leave anyway. They never stayed to hear the life-changing news.
I want to live in a book
, he cried. And buried his worried face in his dirty hands.
This was one of those self-esteem issues that his counselor, Ginette, kept bringing up. All of Freddy’s life he had been told that he was bad and wrong. That he was strange. So when he claimed to be a junkie in order to be near his brother, everyone believed him immediately. No one checked to see if it was actually true. They were relieved he had finally failed so they could stop waiting for it to happen. What had his father, Jeff, threatened him with, night and day, all of his life?
You, you’re gonna be alone.
And then Jeff would abandon Freddy to make his threat come true.
If Jeff had been kind instead, Freddy would not be alone. He would have had a father. But the old man wouldn’t shut up, thereby making happiness impossible.
If you don’t do what I tell you to do, you will be alone.
Jeff repeatedly promised.
And yet, when Freddy did try to obey his dad, he discovered that his father’s wishes were based on a vague fantasy of who Freddy was and what his life was like. A fantasy that was all about his father being right, and not at all possible for Freddy to fulfill. It was a trap. Dad needed Freddy to be wrong. And so, being a loving son and brother, he was.
You will be alone
.
Brothers are for life. Therefore, Freddy had to be with his brother, just to prove his father had made a mistake. Same for those two guys in the book. They had to be together in defiance. Is that any way to live?
Freddy’s hair was bright and orange and overgrown. His eyes, deeply green. His jaw was so slack that saliva should have poured forth, but he sucked on his own tongue all day long to avoid those problems. He was fidgety and it embarrassed him. He knew that he could never have a love relationship with a boy or girl because he was so fidgety, he couldn’t sleep. He’d hang around whenever he wanted to have sex, and when he was through he would leave. Everyone uniformly hated that about him. It was just not acceptable. Even one special girl would rather that he stayed up all night, keeping her awake talking about whatever was on his mind and fucking. But he would not.
She tried to make him love her in the day and he refused. He said that it would deplete him of his essential energies. She thought he was just too shy to make love in the day and that he could not believe how beautiful she thought he was.
This was her fantasy.
The real deal was that he just did not want to walk around in a haze of lust, all dreamily dysfunctional and strange. He didn’t want to feel contented. It was too painful. Then he’d want to commit to her and live with her, sit on a chair with his arms around her, see how beautiful her breasts were, visualize her cunt, sit in two chairs next to each other and read while listening to music. He couldn’t stand the pain of imagining that, because when it disappeared, he’d know he was the failure his father had always threatened he would be. His father would be right because he, Freddy, would be alone.
A
S COLORFUL AND
deeply characterized as Freddy was, his brother Dominick had a very different demeanor. He was plucked. His hair and beard never existed—he had only three eyelashes.
Dominick had pale blue eyes, which provided the only protection for his otherwise defenseless face. He smoked incessantly. His legs had no hair. The only shaggy place on his body was around his genitals, and even there it was five thin strands of silver.
Orange-haired Freddy, on the other hand, was outwardly tormented. His face was wrong. Wrong kinds of expressions popped up at all moments. He chewed his jaw, which set all his facial muscles in discomforting directions. Dominick was quiet, different. He barely spoke. His body was flaccid. He would stand still and quiet, bringing the cigarette to and from his lips. The boys were aware that the entire society had changed while they were in treatment, and that the Outside had become a world of more possibility than either of them had ever known. They each feared the opportunity for opportunity. They were shaky.
That is how each of these guys greeted his new life in the New World.
Freddy and Dominick stood outside the gate, the halfway house behind them. Each had their belongings in the tell-tale vinyl bag that was provided. As they stood still, together, and looked out on the newly transformed city, Freddy paced and rubbed his arms, making strange movements with his mouth and teeth. Dominick stood plastically, smoking another cigarette with even, predictable motions.
Before them unfolded a marvel, beyond what either had expected or imagined. It was a city with no advertising, no logos, no mass-produced images of any kind. Not on buildings, not on buses, not on people. All the color was the natural color of living. People’s faces were the focus.
It was raining. They stepped forward into a wet, slicked, muted city with no pictures of life, only real life. They saw the red of car lights and a sacred purposefulness in the movements of the people, briskly careening. There were no fake humans doing fake things to sell products. Every image was real.
Dominick wondered if his cigarette was done. Then he wondered how many other cigarettes were still waiting in the pack. He decided to hold off until he heard a human voice before checking his pack one more time. Then he heard a passerby say “ouch,” but decided to wait a bit longer anyway. The dread of dealing, of feeling, without having enough cigarettes, was so overwhelming that he could not take in the changes all around.
Freddy, however, was enthralled.
The two different brothers looked at each other and then turned down the block, together, tramping off to their new apartment.
The fact that these two conflicted men could have had fairly humane and effective drug treatment and then walk away, in the rain, to an assigned apartment, was amazing. It seems reasonable, but it had always been unattainable unless the person in question could pay through the nose. But, through the miracle of politics, all the services had been provided. In the old days, they would have never gotten off their drug habits, and would be copping on the street in a matter of minutes, with nothing else to look forward to except that familiar, engrossing hustle. A home would have been an impossibility.
Now, though, with
THE CHANGE
, these boys had everything going for them that society was newly capable of giving. They still had to provide the hope, but that’s why they had each other.
Their new apartment cost sixty-five dollars a month. Each brother had his own chair and his own bed. They shared a bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. There was a long window at the foot of each bed, and when Dominick slid down, slowly, onto his and smoked a cigarette, he looked out over his shoes at the window. A permanent television set. There was a tree out there, and it was moving. The branches were singing. The rain slid off the leaves. It was always changing. He lay there for years, watching the leaves age, revive. The snow would rest on the branches, and then ten new buds, and then a new green.