“God’s will?” you contented yourself with repeating, after hearing the phrase one too many times. “I can’t decide what’s more monstrous: a god who sends little thugs up onto a freeway overpass with bricks to do his dirty work, or the way people believe that a god like that actually exists.”
Their blind trust has never made sense to you, nor the meager delusions to which they cling as proof of being rewarded for their faith. It’s not quite in you to feel smug because you know better, but lately it’s not quite in you to pity them their superstition, either. Mostly it’s disgust that you feel. They call you lost, but that’s just projection, you deduce, because you’re the one who’s comfortable right where you are, realizing there’s no reason for anything that happens, ever. How they hate that, because it grants you a freedom they will never know. A freedom that would paralyze them if they did.
You remember something you read years ago, written by Stephen Crane, and how deep within you resonated the chord it struck: A man said to the universe, “Sir, I exist!” The universe replied, “That fact has not created a sense of obligation in me.”
You take your comfort in the oddest places, don’t you?
*
By autumn, grief has become something permanently affixed to you, like a boil grown too thick to be lanced, drained. It must grow until it bursts, or turns to silently consume you from within. Your friends understand — she truly was everything to you — while you in turn understand their reluctance to be around you these days. You just aren’t that much fun anymore.
She was the last straw, that broke the camel’s heart.
It’s got you thinking — you’ve never really known anyone who’s died of natural causes, have you? Parents and grandparents, plus friends and neighbors and casual lovers, they’ve all left you too early, and in such ghastly ways. Cancers and violence, accidents and congenital defects, aneurysms of the brain and psyche. You’ve heard of people who’ve slipped peacefully away in their sleep, or in their favorite easy chairs, after ripe octogenarian lives, but suspect they must be mythical, in the company of unicorns and mermaids.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think there was a deliberate methodology behind it all, a gradual pattern of calamity spiraling inward until, at last, you’re the only one left to be dealt with. You could be expected to think that, but don’t, because you still keep your wits about you, thank god—
So to speak.
While fall’s vainglorious colors deaden to rusts and browns, and drab wet shadows lengthen across the city, you feel yourself trapped in freefall. The most appealing thing you can think of is the end of it all, by chance or by your own determined hand … yet a spark of hope lingers on, that maybe there’s something out there worth surviving for, if only you could find it.
It turns you into as restless a wanderer as any junkie hoping to score, as an insomniac, as one of Arthur’s knights looking for the Holy Grail. Shoes married to the pavement, you submerge within the wretched refuse. The teeming shores begin at the stoop of the building where you used to live with her. Where you sleep, still, although you seem to have quit living months ago.
You don’t even know what you’re seeking, do you? Only that it’s entirely up to you to find it, to make of it your new life and purpose. Nothing and no one else can do this for you. You take heart, for it can be done: Life, like death, can be as random and abrupt as a brick hurtling from overhead.
*
“Now you take me, for instance,” says Stavros, the old gentleman you’ve come to know and like. “My whole family killed in the war and me just eleven years old. Would I be coming to this country if this hadn’t happened? No, no, I don’t think so. All this life I’ve had here? It would be unknown to me.”
Mornings, before work, you’ve taken to stopping by a sidewalk cafe where Stavros holds his solitary court, drinking cup after cup of coffee. Against the autumn chill he wears a bulky knit sweater and on his head a flat billed cap, and if back in Greece he would look like any ordinary fisherman. Here, though, he seems exotic, a rogue and an adventurer.
“Do you ever think you’d’ve been better off if things had just stayed the same?” you ask.
He laughs, showing his great mouthful of strong, stained teeth. “Never. God rest their poor souls, every one of them, but these were people, let me tell you, who’d clutch a child to their bosoms ‘til it suffocated. It wouldn’t have been a bit different with me.” Stavros peers into his coffee, the twinkle in his eye sharpening into something more cunning. “I was liberated. Freed to become all the things that my first life kept away.”
He tells you stories, as he does each morning since you first paid him attention. Tells you what it was like to cross an ocean and see the world unfolding with eleven-year-old eyes. You listen, and you breathe in the scents of coffee and buses, watching both his seafarer’s face and the brisk sidewalk passage of everyone who, unlike you, is going to arrive at work on time this morning.
He’s the only friend, new or old, who doesn’t seem to mind being around you. And you wonder: Which of you is more desperate for a companion?
You’re not sure when you first became aware of it, only that it seemed to imperceptibly creep up on you. Something you might’ve noticed the moment you sat down but only acknowledged after nearly an hour: Someone is waving at you. Across the busy street and down one building; a second floor window, ornately archaic, in contrast with the more modern storefront below. Few ever pay any mind to the extinct architecture above their heads. Amazing, the way gargoyles can hide in plain sight.
It’s no one you know — you’re quite sure of it, just as you’re sure it’s you this woman is waving at. Even from across the street you can see how white and pasty her skin is, her thick and naked shoulders sloping beneath greasy straggles of dark hair. Modesty isn’t her virtue, obviously, and you watch, half-fascinated, half-repulsed, as her breasts squash against the window.
A vivid red grin, the only true color about her, splits her face when she realizes that you notice her.
“Do you … see that?” you ask Stavros, and point.
But even as you ignore her frantic overtures for you to come up, come up and join her, you have the feeling that just as this invitation is for you alone, so is the sight itself.
“See what?” he says.
“I…” You shake your head. “I should be getting on to work,” and when you’re halfway down the block curiosity gets the better of you, and you turn around to see her waving goodbye — or at least until next time.
*
The skin condition begins like a common rash, spreading and intensifying from there, from scalp to face, down to your neck and shoulders and chest, your back and arms. A great portion of your waking hours are simply spent scratching an itch that never feels sated, and within days you can scarcely bear to pass before a mirror. Scaly red patches, some crusty from too much scratching … you don’t wear them well, but then who does?
The dermatologist diagnoses psoriasis. What’s causing it, you want to know. Why? Together you rule out food allergies, various environmental irritants to which you may have exposed yourself. You’ve not changed these sorts of routines in quite some time.
“Of course,” says the doctor, “we can’t overlook an emotional component to this outbreak.”
Swell. You’re not even supposed to grieve properly?
Treatments begin, oral dosages of etretinate and sessions of outpatient ultrasound hyperthermia, but you don’t seem to make any improvement. To the contrary, you seem to be getting worse. It gets to the point where your boss thinks it would be a fine idea if you’d take sick leave. You’re not the only one relieved. This is welcomed by an entire office full of people to whom you must be becoming terribly aberrant. And at whom you’ve been increasingly tempted to scream, “None of you knows just how lucky you are, not a single complacent one of you!”