Here is at last our end goal, the child’s dream come to its fulfillment: Having begun again to fall and twist fearfully in the air, we find our will; we aim our face down; we do not say “fall,” but “dive”; we watch the ground rush to meet our eyes. Here it is. We do not make land-fall. We are a line intersecting a plane. We shoot through.
21
Ciccio stood up from the curb.
The Russians weren’t coming. People lost track of time when they played cards, that was all.
The glut of crumpled paper cups and napkins and sandwich wrappers clogging the grates of the storm sewers was such that when the thunderstorm that was about to crack open above his head finally cracked, the streets would flood, the trash would float down to the creek and sail through the night toward its mouth and settle at last on the floor of the lake. If he stayed right here he would see the last evidence of the crowd carried off on the water. And if a cyclone touched down on this place and lifted the buildings away, and if he chose to stay here and watch. .
Was that the choice? Were those the only choices? Whether to take shelter in the basement of a heavy building or to stay, to stay, to stay, out here and watch and risk being carried off into the air? The storm was coming, the storm was saying, Either stay here and watch me and be carried off, or take cover; either way you have to answer to me. But he didn’t want to. No. He didn’t want to answer it. No, he didn’t. He didn’t.
It wasn’t until he came to a halt on the corner of Eighteenth Street to check for cars coming (there were no cars coming) that he said to himself, I’ve stood up from the curb and I’m carrying myself away and out. He didn’t know this was happening until he described it to himself. Likewise, he didn’t know he was running until he was on the bridge (the wind blasting him backward, only still he was going forward across the bridge, in the direction of the boulevard) and said to himself that he wasn’t sprinting, he was galloping, that was the word, in his dress shoes through the wealth of garbage on the pavement of the bridge.
Two colored women were waiting at the streetcar stop, an older one and a younger one that only looked old, both of them laughing on the bench there. He couldn’t hear what they were laughing about. It was still windier than before. The younger one was rubbing the sole of the unshod foot of the older one, who wore pearls in her ears and whose long hair was braided with a piece of ribbon and coiled around the crown of her head like a wreath.
He counted his change. There was an electric ozone odor of imminent summer rain. The smell of No more work today, time to get inside, there’s a honeydew for after supper. He didn’t want to go in under the awning of the trolley stop with the colored women because he wanted to feel the rain on his head when it came. For a second the wind quit squalling and he heard the older one say, “That’s a coincidence. They don’t call it a corn because it’s like corn. They call it that because it grows out of the bone like a horn does.”
Ozone was the result of electricity shooting through the air, forming oxygen molecules with three atoms instead of two, and young people smelling it were stricken with nostalgia even when they had never left home before.
Then the streetcar came and the colored women got on it, and he did, too.
Later, on the train heading west along the lakeshore, a train that was, as it happened, the last scheduled departure from Erie Station Tower for the night, the conductor asked him for the ticket he hadn’t bought. Ciccio reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. But the ticket wasn’t there! He stood and turned his trouser pockets inside out. He’d forgotten it at home! “Oh, jeez, you’ll kick me off the train!” he said.
The conductor’s rheumy eyes came up to Ciccio’s jutting Adam’s apple, and his mutton-chop whiskers grew into his mustache, so that he looked like Chester Arthur and also like a walrus. He filled his cheeks with air and expelled it pensively, looking at the loosened knot of the tie that Donna Costanza had made Ciccio put on for lunch and that Ciccio would have taken off by now if he’d had a bag to stow it in.
He didn’t even have to use the weepy story about the aunt who was expecting him, who’d be pulling out her hair with worry when he didn’t get off the train in Toledo. The conductor just wagged his head sadly, unspeaking, and continued up the aisle. It was a Christian country. He was a kid, there were no real punishments for the likes of him.
He woke up when the train pulled into Sandusky, then he went back to sleep.
He woke up again when the conductor was passing in the dark of the aisle toward the dim light of the gangway that led to the next car. “Mishawaka,” the conductor called. “Mishawaka, Indiana, approaching. Mishawaka.” The ashtray in the armrest of the window seat was stuck shut with chewing gum. It was deeply dark in the cabin. When the gangway door slammed behind the conductor’s back, Ciccio stood up. He couldn’t see anyone else in the cabin with him. Briefly he thought of himself, of what he might be feeling. But he figured that could only be fear, which had derailed him in the past and would not derail him now. And although he knew it was better to feel than to think, he resolved to think instead.
He thought of salmon, and bugs.
Then he thought of Father Delano, teacher of Christian Doctrine, and a game the priest had made them play in class a few months back, a kind of parlor amusement for Jesuit cocktail parties.
“Write in ink on a scrap of paper,” the bumptious, shrunken, emphatic, salt white priest had said, “the deadly sin to which your character is most likely to fall prey. Don’t think. Just fess up. Nobody else will see this. It’s for your own reference.” Ciccio wrote wrath and gluttony. Then he struck out gluttony. He was still growing, after all. Father Delano said, “What you have written down so quickly is ipso facto a sin you can acknowledge with ease. You are reconciled to this sin. You are clandestinely prideful of it. The ego generated this response. The function of the ego is to what? To protect the self from the world of others. Now then, being boys and being sixteen years of age, you certainly answered ‘lust’ or ‘wrath,’ all of you. I am quite assured. You even believe in the sinfulness of your sin, that it is not in fact soi-disant okay to act lustfully or wrathfully, but this is also charming. That you believe it is a sin is the source of its charm for you.
“Therefore. There is another sin, which isn’t charming. A real sin. No, it is not charming at all. Write down the real sin. I give you twenty seconds this time. No one will know.” When he spoke, he exposed his piebald incisors and flexed his nostrils in spasms and allowed his saliva to collect in a froth at the edges of his lips. He was Swiss, but you could never hear the accent. He had advanced tuberculosis. It was his last year at the school. They’d all heard the news that the order was planning to send him in the fall to a sanitarium in Oklahoma. But he was to die in June in his bed in the rectory, in Ohio.
Ciccio had dipped his pen. Vanity, he wrote in a burst. Then he looked at the word. He couldn’t remember if it was one of the seven on its own or if it was a species of pride. No, it was a species of pride, the species concerned not with the insensible but with the sensible portion of the self. And it didn’t fit him right.
“I want you to consider the darkness in your hearts, boys, how deeply dark it is in there. Surely what you’ve just written down still fails to puncture the shell of your viciousness. If it was so easy of access and if you truly believed in the sinfulness of it, you would have fixed it already. This second sin is a mask for the sin about which you cannot come clean. The ego protects the self from assaults from without but also from within, namely, in this case, from knowledge of your real sin. Your real sin, which is what?”