He said, “I’ll tell you what, I understand this just well enough to miss the point.”
He asked Father Manfred what it would mean to be a Thomist. Would he take another name, like the nuns did? But that was a joke. Manfred said the best illustration he could think of was something he’d read in the seminary:
Picture a seascape, he said. Now picture the sky over this sea. In the deep distance it becomes difficult to tell the sky and the sea apart. There is a thin strip at the horizon, a middle space, a third space, where the other two realms appear mixed-up. This is the Thomist view of what a person is; a person is what happens when the material (the sea) and the spiritual (the sky) intersect.
Well and good, Ciccio thought. From the shore it was often difficult to say where sky ended and water began. But what did it mean that he knew that in fact the sky and the surface of the water did not meet, that it was just an illusion that they met? It implied that a person was either material or spiritual or neither. Sorry. It made no sense.
They were killing him with work. He didn’t know what they were trying to turn him into. But he didn’t know what he was, either.
March. There was the smell on the air of mud drying, of the everywhere mud of late winter drying up at last. What was the smell like? It was like the faint, bitter odor of a bin of roofing nails.
Young Mazzone was on his way to school, briskly, wide-strided, on the cusp of running. He was on the cusp of running because he had the blues, and the SJs were making him over in their image, and when they had the blues they took long walks at high speeds to purge the blood of base fluids. He was hopping a little as he went. He was the merest bit out of breath, which was good.
His route downtown, Saint Ambrose Boulevard, was the straightest shot west from Elephant Park, but it was only sporadically paral leled by proper sidewalks. Most of the way he had to toe the curb or else slop through the mud alongside, where road salt had destroyed the grass. The cleaner route took half again as long. A streetcar jangled down the median. The boulevard was asphalt in the outer lanes, brick in the inner, and gravel down the middle, where the tracks ran. Where houses remained, they were fantastic multicolored ruins with porch-roof posts that no longer reached the sagging porches, with windows busted in, each one, for sport, with scoliotic chimneys, with doorways missing the doors or boarded up, with trim that had once (you could see through the peeling white) been painted three or four carefully patterned pastel tints. Gargoyles instead of aluminum downspouts drained the gutters and spoke of the kind of money he was pretty sure didn’t exist anymore. The houses did not, any of them, show the first sign of sentient life. Dark vines with showy pink buds grew up the walls and into the windows. Terra-cotta roof tiles dappled the gardens. It was a village of gingerbread houses someone had left outside to be tramped by the dog, to be eaten by raccoons, or to go to pudding in the rain.
Farther on, the boulevard veered north along the lip of a sandstone quarry and through a huddle of unpainted shanties where the Syrians had used to live; and then some colored people had lived there, but recently they had moved away, too. Then the road cut through a meadow that you could see had, years ago, been farmed — the earth was leveled out and there was a rock wall to one side where someone had piled the glacial debris. Sugar maples and scrub sumacs hemmed the meadow in, plotting its overthrow. A beech sapling grew straight out of the top of the wall.
Then, past the meadow — he checked his pulse, he sped up — the rail line forked to the south, and nearly all the auto traffic merged onto the new U.S. highway, and the road narrowed to two brick lanes.
After a hundred yards, it emerged on the lip of a great, sloping cliff.
And he had to stop here — how could he not stop here, daily, the scene sort of inflicting itself on him? Four hundred million years ago, the place where he stood was a seabed covered with a sheet of mud. The mud hardened, was covered with new mud that hardened, and so on, and became, by the time the sea receded, a vast cache of wafer-thin layers of shale beneath the surface. Then recently the river had cut it open, and then a glacier had followed the river’s path and widened the gap into a broad valley walled off by the cliff. Below him, the brittle black shale lay sloppily stacked, like an enormous palisade of burned newspapers. And he could see this mud-colored river down in the valley, convolving from the southern woods into the open plain beneath the cliff, where the vast, decaying, ash-bedecked, enchanted city arrayed itself, alive and sulfur smelling, this city, his home.
He kept on walking to the school. None of the trees down here were in bloom. The shortest route into the valley was a one-way cobblestone street called Reckless Avenue. He descended the cliff at top speed. His feet were wheels.
A mist rose from the city, a slow exhalation from a great dying animal.
The yellowish morning air browned as he approached the blast furnaces on the flats, down at the bottom of the shale valley walls, and he was trying to train himself to notice things like this, perversities, that the air itself was a sort of military-uniform color, khaki, you called it. He’d discovered the color of city air on the farm, perversely, where the air was colorless. He had trouble seeing what was right in front of him. Khaki came from Urdu for “dustlike.”
There were taverns across the street from the mountainous steel mills amid which West Seventh Avenue passed. And depending on what time he went by there he caught either the third-shift men heading mill to bar or the first shift heading bar to mill.
He cut through a brickyard and through a hospital parking lot and through the SJs’ vegetable garden and then was at the school.
Nino and Ricky were waiting for him behind the boiler room.
It was 7:15 in the morning.
Nino, scratching his back on the quoin blocks, said, “Hello, Eminence.”
The matinal meeting of the Gentlemen’s Smoking Society commenced. They had waited for him, which he appreciated.
Nothing important was going to happen today.
He looked at Nino.
Nino had a broad, glum face. His dad was the sergeant at arms of the local to which Ciccio’s father had belonged. He had a twin called Cornflake, or Corny, even by the mother, supposedly. This twin lived in a state home for retarded children, where he was visited twice weekly by his mother and brothers but not by the father. Ciccio had never seen the twin. He suspected the twin was a hoax, only Nino’s was a face you thought incapable of lying. There was a theme in its construction — the eye placement that was a fraction of an inch too far toward the temples, the sharply protruding jaw, the downward point of the corners of his mouth — the theme being that he had the face of a big, guileless trout. Ciccio hadn’t seen this before just now.
He looked at Ricky. He didn’t know what Ricky looked like. He was looking right at Ricky and couldn’t see anything other than brown hair, blue blazer, dandruff on the blazer. How long had he known Ricky, and he couldn’t say what he looked like?
He was trying to notice perversities. It wasn’t hard. They were everywhere. Grotesqueries. He had recently approached the bathroom mirror, tape measure in hand, in the coolest scientific spirit, unsuspecting he would find anything definitive but needing a control sample for his research into the grotesque. And he’d found, mirabile visu, and not without a certain prideful shock, that his own features were crookedly affixed to his face, that that was what was the matter with it. And he had not been aware. And he imagined that real manhood, freedom, would mean that all these mysteries that he couldn’t see were mysteries because they were too close to him would reveal themselves. He would be permitted to see what had from the start been hiding right out here in the open.