Michael Rizza - Cartilage and Skin

In a bitter cold December, when the city’s main concern was the surplus of homeless people freezing to death, I realized that society wasn’t merely apathetic. Indifferent and devoid of the slightest bit of warmth, it seemed to have passively abandoned me. Yet I abruptly learned, on one harrowing day, that society actually possessed certain mechanisms to hasten a man’s devolution. They didn’t simply allow him to decay at his own pace; they dug him up just to throw lime on him.

It was a Tuesday morning, while I was pretending to be Marduk and chatting with several supposedly single Jews, when a phone call disrupted my connection to the Internet. The instant I heard the sound of the social worker’s voice, I went numb and slipped into a defense mode: I adopted the equanimity of the conscientious and obliging citizen, and yet beneath this mask, I remained as alert as a spooked rabbit. Yes, I said. She wanted to know if I could come to the clinic that afternoon. Of course, sure, yes, I said. I even began to nod my head as I acquiesced, although the woman couldn’t possibly have seen the gesture through the telephone line. There was trouble with the boy.

Months ago, when the boy had first met his social worker and doctors, his demeanor vacillated between extended stretches of stolid silence — less due to his distrust of the doctors than to his impulse to protect a secret or even a person — and stretches of tireless rants and tirades that were punctuated by flashes of grotesquely sexual knowledge and imagery. At other moments, however, he became a cheerful boy who lacked the faintest trace of depravity; during these calmer interludes, when he seemed most approachable, the doctors tried to advance their investigation. I imagine that this itself was surely a perverse scene because the boy would be sitting at the table, fiddling with the tongue of his sneaker, the tattered string to the hood of his sweat jacket, or whatever else was loosely attached to him, in a light blue aura of innocence, like an ordinary child; and then a full-grown adult, his size unsettlingly conspicuous in relation to the boy’s slight frame, would cautiously sit down and try amicably to initiate an obscene conversation, asking questions that no healthy boy could possibly understand. From what I was told, the boy conveyed his responses, though fragmented, in a thoughtful and sweet tone, as if he were listing all the fun he’d had at school that day. He said that his father used to cut up his spaghetti into tiny bits, so he could eat it with a spoon. Also, he was afraid of the “bottle man” because he smelled of licorice and made bird noises. “Cunt-whore”—who was possibly more than one person, an amalgam in the boy’s mind — was shaved clean; one of his legs was raw red below the knee, and his eyes would smile whenever he wanted a little spice or to make a cream pie. The fancy-dressed man in the dark room with the bugs sometimes used to cry, and he called the boy Missy. Although he often gave the boy small gifts, such as a can of soda or a box of colored markers, he also threatened that if the boy didn’t stop ruining his home life, he’d make a necklace out of the boy’s teeth. Other characters, all without proper names, appeared in the boy’s story, but most likely only one or two people made several distinct reappearances in the boy’s memory. Nevertheless, one thing was unmistakably clear: The boy trusted me. Apparently, he came to me when he was sick because I always made certain that we were even. I wasn’t needy, consuming, or unfair. By some intuitive reflex unbeknownst to myself, I demanded that everything between us remain upfront and equal. If the balance was off in any way, it was because I was generous. With everyone else in his life, except for the shadowy image of a dimly remembered father, things were uneven in the other direction. In part, the originality of the boy’s theory of scales seemed to throw doubt on any question of Stockholm syndrome. His allegiance to me was in earnest; I was a good man, not a captor. Yet, despite the boy’s affection, I disclaimed him, telling the doctors and the police that I didn’t really know the boy or what had happened to him. I had to wash my hands of him. I distrusted the investigators because I sensed that everything they told me about the boy’s situation served as a roundabout way of trying to indict me; they were feeding me specific details to see what and when I would bite. Of course, I never let them suspect that I understood their insidious method, and rather than let them play me off of the boy, I acted like a vaguely curious bystander.

But then, after allegedly being cleared of suspicion and hearing nothing about the boy for several months, I sat at my desk and stared at the frozen screen of my computer: the suspended conversation between discontent people, the half sentence of a supposedly twenty-nine-year old marketing rep who went under the alias of Bonzo. He had been confessing, with a hint of self-pity, that he always came across as too cerebral, so he needed to be more open and free, to learn how to “live life through the fingertips.” I sipped my hot tea and smiled, ready to point out his unintentional irony, with some clever comment about his typing skills — when the phone suddenly rang, severing me from Bonzo and the rest of the people in the chat room.

“Yes,” I said. “Sure. I can come down this afternoon.”

The social worker informed me that the boy was deteriorating, and she thought that maybe he would respond to me. For weeks, he hadn’t said a single word, and each day he slipped more and more into a catatonic state, not so much by the clinical definition; it was simply a profound listlessness, a self-annihilation. He’d stopped eating, and he’d left the doctors no choice but to feed him intravenously. After several days in bed, hooked up to tubes, he’d decided to cease movement altogether, not even to relieve himself. Because he lacked certain traumatic symptoms, the social worker surmised that his condition was suicidal, not a cry for help, but a genuine disinterest in life.

When I hung up the phone, my immediate reaction was one of dread. With a simple phone call, on a random Tuesday, the problem of the boy thrust itself back into my life, and I was obliged to deal with it. As much as I wanted to tell the social worker that I had no interest in the subject — perhaps even affect a lazy yawn and apologize for finding the whole ordeal terribly boring, like a photo album of her cousin’s wedding or a stack of back issues of a gardening magazine — I had to agree to visit her and the boy. I stood up violently from my desk and started stomping about the room, circling the coffee table and couch, making abrupt half-turns and new starts, and once or twice stabbing at the air with my fist, until my mixture of confusion and fear began to metamorphose into a different emotion. I was becoming angry. Yes, it was bad enough that I’d felt unwelcome in the world and had to seek refuge in my own cramped little room. Now, this tiny portion of security was being taken away from me too. I felt as though society had designated for me a lonely cage and, as soon as I submitted and agreed to lock myself in, the outside world decided to invade my space and root me out.

Of course, I would never reveal my unease to the social worker or anyone else. I would be as concerned, sincere, and helpful as needed. My appointment was a few hours away, giving me time to prepare both my attitude and my attire. After I ate my customary bowl of cereal — tiny, round, sweetened puffs — I hurriedly headed toward the bathroom, mildly reproaching myself for being J. C., the man who peed a lot. If I couldn’t convince a few silly high school students that I was a serious writer, or Stephen that I possessed a dash of repose, or Lyle Tartles that I was an art aficionado, or Claudia Jones that I was harmless, then how was I supposed to convince the social worker that I was a compassionate citizen. Standing before the toilet, I thought about Claudia Jones again; she was divided up and categorized in my mind, a collection of parceled pieces. I continued to imagine her all the while I showered, brushed my teeth, wiped the steamy mirror with my underwear, and inspected my reflection. I could no longer see her distinctly; she became for me a jumble of images, which flitted, one by one, along the edges of my mind. The side of my head was a rich purple. Thankfully, most of the bruise was concealed beneath my hair. I didn’t want the social worker to see my head and ask what had happened. I gingerly combed my hair, wiped the renewed steam away, and then touched my temple with a single, gentle fingertip.