Leonard Michaels - The Collected Stories

He would write his girl this first day after work, thought Beckman, a letter of impressions, feelings, hopes, and the specific promise of their future, for now he wanted to get married, and his small gray eyes saw themselves reading that line as he leaned toward the mirror and shaved around the welts and scabs. His brows showed the puffed ridges of a pug’s discolored, brutalized flesh where a billion capillaries had been mashed and meat-hammered to the consistency of stone. Ugly, but not meaningless, and Beckman could even feel glad there had been nothing worse, no brain damage, no broken eardrum, no blindness, and could indeed see qualities that pleased him in the petrified, moiled meat, Hardness and Danger, not in his face or in his soul before the beating, but there now as in the faces of junkies, whores, bums, pimps, and bar fighters, the city’s most deeply kicked, stabbed, and slashed, whom he had carried to and fro in his cab; memento mori twisted into living flesh reflected in his rearview mirror, reflected now in his bathroom mirror, like the rock formations of aboriginal desert and plateau where snakes, lizards, and eagles subsist and life is true and bleak, where all things move in pure, deep knowledge of right and wrong or else they die. Beckman whispered, “They die,” and the ruined flesh gave substance to the cocky twist of his head, his manner of speaking out of the side of his mouth and twisting his head as though whoever he addressed lived on his hip, though he himself was a few inches less than average height. The sense of his small hands flapped suddenly in his mind as the furies dragged him over the seat like a dumb, insentient bag, though he shrieked take his money, which they would take anyway, and his body refused to yield its hideous residue of consciousness even as they mercilessly refused to grant it any. He couldn’t remember when he had passed out or ceased to feel pain or his voice had stopped, but thought now that he had continued screaming after he had stopped thinking or moving, and that they had continued beating him until his undeliberate, importunate voice stopped of its own. They couldn’t have been human and so persisted, but had to have been sublime things which had seized Beckman as the spirit seizes the prophet, twists his bones, and makes him bleed in agonies of knowledge. Beckman, so gifted, saw himself like the Trojan Cassandra, battered, raped on the rowing benches by Agamemnon’s men, and she was Apollo’s thing. But then he looked into the mirror, looked at the lumps above his eyes and at the flesh burned green and blue around his mouth. Not a shaman’s face. He pulled his tongue through space once filled by an eyetooth and molar, licked sheer, delicate gum.

Enough, this was another Beckman. In truth, no prophet, but neither a bag scrunched into leather, glass, and steel, commanded by anyone to stop, go, ache, count change out of nasty fingers, breathe gas, and hear youth ticked away in nickels. This was Beckman among painters, learning the business, gallon can in each hand, surveying the great hollow vault of the factory which he and the men were come to paint. High brick walls seemed not to restrict but merely to pose theoretical demarcations in all the space now his. He and the gang of painters trudged with cans, brushes, and ropes up a wall toward the sky and the factory’s clangor dropped beneath them to a dull, general boom like a distant sea. The light they rose toward grew sharper and whiter as they entered it climbing the narrow stairway that shivered beneath their feet. Paint cans knocked the sides of Beckman’s legs, the loops cut thin channels into his palms. At the top of the factory, against the white, skylighted morning, they settled their equipment on a steel platform. The men stirred cans of paint, attached ropes to the pipes that ran along beneath the skylight, and moved out on swings into the voluminous air. Beckman stood back on the platform trying to look shrewdly into the nature of these things and feel his relevance. The sun drifted toward the vertical and blazed through the skylight. It drilled the top of his head as he concentrated on a painter swinging ten feet out from the edge of the platform, his arm and trunk like a heavy appendage dangling from his hand. His feet jerked in vast nothing. His swing was suspended from a pipe running beside the one he painted, and as he moved farther from the platform he left yards of gleaming orange behind him. Beckman felt his breathing quicken as he leaned after the long smack and drag of the painter’s brush. Repeated, overlapped, and soon, between Beckman and the painter, burned thirty feet of the hot, brilliant color. Beckman yearned to participate, confront unpainted steel, paint it, see it become a fresh, different thing as he dissolved in the ritual of strokes. The painter stopped working and looked at him. A vein split the man’s temple down the center and forked like the root of a tree. Flecks of orange dazzled on his cheeks. He pointed with his brush to a can near the edge of the platform and Beckman snapped it up, stepped to the edge, and held it out into the air toward the painter. Thus, delivering the can, he delivered himself, grabbed life in the loop and hoisted it like a gallon of his own blood, swinging it out like a mighty bowler into the future. Concrete floor, towering walls, steeping light hosannaed while Beckman’s arm stiffened and shuddered from wrist to mooring tendons in his neck as he held the stance, leaned with the heavy can like an allegorical statue: Man Reaching. The painter grinned, shook his head, and Beckman saw in a flash blinding blindness that his effort to reach thirty feet was imbecilic. His head wrenched back for the cocky vantage of height and relieved his stance of allegory. He shuffled backward with a self-mocking shrug and set down the can as if lifting it in the first place had been a mistake. The painter’s grin became a smile and he tapped the pipe to which his swing was attached. Beckman understood — deliver the can by crawling down the pipe. Aggravation ripped his heart. A sense of his life constituted of moments like this, inept and freakish, when spirit, muscle, and bone failed to levels less than thing, a black lump of time, flew out of his occipital cup like a flung clod and went streaming down the inside of his skull with the creepy feel of slapstick spills, twitches, flops, and farts of the mind. But the painter had resumed his good work and Beckman, relieved and gratified, was instantly himself again, immune to himself, and snapped up the can. At the edge of the platform he stooped, laid his free hand on the pipe, then straddled the pipe. He clutched the loop in his right hand, shoved off the platform, tipped forward and dragged with his knees, thighs, and elbows down toward the painter. His feet dangled, his eyes dug into the pipe, and he pushed. He dragged like a worm and didn’t think or feel what he did. Fifteen feet from the edge of the platform he stopped to adjust his grip on the can, heavier now and swinging enough to make him feel uneasy about his right side and make him tighten his grip on the left so hard he pitched left. The can jerked up, both legs squeezed the pipe, and a tremor set into his calves and shanks, moving toward his buttocks and lower back.

Beckman squeezed the pipe with his legs and arms and slipped his left hand gradually under the pipe to cup its belly. His right hand, clutching the loop of the can, hung straight down, and Beckman leaned his chin against the pipe and listened to his shirt buttons rasp against steel. He breathed slowly to minimize the rasping and gaped down the pipe at the hard, curved flare of morning light. His knees felt through cloth to steel and the pipe’s belly was slick in his palm. The tremor, in his shoulders now, moved up toward the muscles of his neck. Against his mouth he smelled, then tasted, steel as it turned rancid with sweat and spit. He felt water pour slowly, beyond his will, into his pants as it had when they hit him and hit him for no reason and he twisted and shrieked on the floor of his cab. He felt the impulse to move and did not want to look around into the vacuous air, nor to imagine the beating or the possibility that the tremor in his chin and lips would become a long, fine scream spinning out the thread of his life as he dropped toward the machines and the concrete floor. He felt the impulse to move and he could remember how motion felt gathering in his body to move his body, how it felt gathering, droning in the motor of his cab, to move him through the dark avenues of the city. He stared down the pipe, clung to it, and saw the painter stop working to look at him, looking at him with surprise, saying as if only with lips, slowly, again and again, “Hold on, Beckman.” He clung to the pipe, squeezed life against his chest, and would neither let go nor drag toward the painter. He heard men shout from the platform, “Don’t let go, Beckman.” He did not let go. The tremor passed into muscle as rigid as the steel it squeezed.