Michael Rizza - Cartilage and Skin

I spat again, this time on a scrappy tree, planted to adorn the street but now choked and horribly displaced.

A couple was coming my way, the girl leaning against the boy. She was dressed in a heap of gray sweat clothes. He had a sweatband riding low across his forehead, covering his eyebrows; his black hair appeared to have exploded out of the top of his head, as if by a shotgun blast. She hugged his arm, snuggled it between her breasts. Her caramel skin appeared to glow with beauty, simply because she was happy to be on an afternoon stroll with her boyfriend in the bitter cold. Although they were young, and their affection toward one another seemed to contain something pure and innocent, I knew, of course, that they copulated as often as they had the opportunity to be alone, that she longed to take out his penis and adore it, and that she would work him dry in dirty adoration. She would grin filthily at his satisfaction. He would feign indifference, but that was part of his allure.

As we began to close the space between us, I wanted them to see the indignation on my face. Far away, on a distant street, a small dog began to yelp, faint but incessant. Somewhere in the back of my mind, my spirit was inexplicably emboldened by the notion of being on a mission: The boy needed me, and I was heading toward some heroic gesture. I felt more important than the young couple on the sidewalk. This feeling was similar to the sense of petty power that I had experienced when I was a gangly college student working as an usher in the local movie theatre. That job had lasted only a few weekends because I had found too much cynical joy in strolling up and down the aisle, then suddenly shining the beam of my flashlight on the faces of some young, cuddly couple, disrupting their warm, romantic mood.

As they walked, the boy said something to the girl, and she — all lovely and beautiful and devoted — smiled and held onto him, as though she lacked an ego of her own and only he, who was seemingly all grunts and stonework, was her abiding strength.

For some reason, I wanted to dismantle them, not with profundity or truth, but with disdain. I was leering, full of bile, ready for confrontation. I wished I had my flashlight. Perhaps if there was no ultimate happiness, then there should be no momentary happiness either.

The boy, however, had his eye on me. He was speaking to her, but looking at me. Before I could say anything, he cut me short.

“What are you looking at, poppy?”

And so we passed one another on the street, and only the dim shadow of my intended action fell across the happy couple. In another pace or two, I once again ceased to exist to them; they strolled onward in the aura of their own radiance, in love and impenetrable. As the sound of their footsteps gradually died, I continued to hear the crazy yapping of the dog. Now it sounded closer.

I consoled myself with the thought of the couple’s insignificance. They were oblivious; they couldn’t have known that not far away, laid out in a hospital bed, a tortured and emaciated boy waited for me. This portrait of the boy was displayed clearly before me, yet most of it was conjured out of my imagination because I’d never actually seen the boy in such a helpless condition, nor had I ever been to the building to which I was now heading. The social worker had given me the address over the phone, and I had surely passed the place numerous times during my tenure in the city, but I had no memory of a clinic being there. Perhaps it was inconspicuous, only a weathered shingle beside a thin door.

I looked at my watch; I had time to kill. My head ached with the cold, and I wanted to find a place to sit for a moment and drink a cup of coffee. I needed to recoup my thoughts, for my mind felt burdened by too many concerns. Chief among them was the strange and terrible McTeal, who seemed to be crouching in some darkened nook, biding his time, waiting to spring on me. There had to be a reasonable way to handle this threat, yet ever since I’d learned from Claudia Jones that I’d disturbed the pervert’s fantasy world, I sensed myself delaying to come to any conclusions. Whenever this dilemma entered my mind, my thoughts would scramble around frantically, like startled mice in a cage, and then I would suddenly resolve to run away. Now that the actual crisis had manifested itself on the sidewalk, in a corduroy jacket and a green cap, I still had no viable solution. Perhaps I was planning to wait until he got closer, until he was finally hiding in my bedroom closet and listening for me to drift off to sleep. Although I was heading toward the boy, I would eventually have to go home, where it no longer seemed safe.

I passed an apartment with its windows lined with Christmas lights that were already turned on, shining and blinking in vibrant colors. Not only was it too early in the day for lights but also everything seemed too drab and cold for such a giddy display. Yet it subtly evoked a fresh train of thought, for I went rapidly from thinking of the imminent holiday season and all its trappings to Christmas carols; and then Claudia Jones was sitting on the milkcrate in the alley outside my window, humming “What Child Is This?” In the next instant, my image of her fragmented, and she was divided into all her particular parts, which randomly drifted along the edges of my mind — yet, before I was fully aware of what I was thinking, a small, hysterical yapping dog bounded out of a narrow side street and continued its frenzy on the sidewalk. A larger dog lingered slowly behind it. An imperceptible string seemed to connect the lowered nose of the larger dog to the tail end of the small one.

Alarmed, I stopped walking and fixed my attention on the animals.

They were about ten paces in front of me.

The small dog, an indeterminable mixture of breeds, didn’t seem to be barking randomly into the air, but actually at certain objects. It looked at the tire of a parked car and barked at it. Then the dog wheeled around and barked down the side street from which it had just emerged. Then it barked at the curb a few times. It turned and barked at the tire again. Its every movement was followed by the larger dog, some kind of gray-coated Husky which, bent at the waist, made awkward side steps and even circled around, always keeping its nose close to the other dog’s tail. Both of them were without collars and seemingly disease-ridden, for the hair of the mutt was clumped and tangled, and its underbelly was especially dirty from apparently having trailed through slush; the Husky was missing patches of hair, and large black growths, shaped like cauliflower, blossomed from its joints.

At the curb was an old stone post with a metal hoop on top, to which older generations of men used to tether their horses. For some reason, the small dog focused on this post and unleashed a savagery of abrupt yaps. Because the dogs appeared absorbed for the moment, I thought I had the opportunity to slip away unobserved. I wondered for an instant if I should retreat to the next street over or simply try to pass the dogs by crossing the road. Either way, my instinct was to get immediately out of their line of sight by stepping off the sidewalk and putting the row of parked cars between us.

The instant I took my eyes off the dogs and moved between the bumpers of two parked cars, the incessant yapping stopped. I stood in the road, beside the back fender of a car, completely unnerved by the sudden silence. I crouched down and looked through the windows, trying to locate the dogs. The tethering post was visible, but the beasts were no longer by it. I had no idea if my movement had distracted them or if it was something else and they were right now chasing after it. Afraid to budge in the slightest bit, I continued to look through the windows, but not seeing the stray dogs, I huddled closer to the car and decided to wait until I was certain that danger had passed. I wanted to hear the furious yapping again — but at great distance. I was half-hoping that some unfortunate pedestrian might casually wander upon the scene and fall prey to the full fury of the animals — for at least long enough for me to run away.