Michael Rizza - Cartilage and Skin

The bloated thing lingered at the end of the aisle, poking around boxes of candy with its gloved hand.

And then, all at once, my unfocused suspicion turned into a distinct, palpable fear. I imagined that the black man was spying on me; although I couldn’t see his face, I trusted that he was following through with his promise to know when I ate or slept. Because he was investigating a crime with an international scope, he was certainly more than a typical policeman. Thus, I imbued him with all the wily and sophisticated techniques of a covert portion of the government. And now that I thought about it, neither he nor Dr. Ferguson had told me what agency they worked for. Somehow this lack of definiteness seemed to extend their power into a more mysterious, less ethical realm.

With my two items, I walked around and came back down a farther aisle. As I passed a long display of cards for all occasions, from birth to death, I began to rationalize that the bloated body was simply a fat, ordinary citizen. Even so, when I approached the cash register, I kept my purchase guarded from his view. I didn’t need him speculating about my underwear or creating a special file for all things that occurred — or didn’t occur — beneath my beltline. Despite my awareness of the corpulent creature in my periphery, I didn’t give in to the temptation to turn my head and take a fuller look. However, when I exited the store, I glanced back through the glass door and noticed that the body had moved away from the candy and was now browsing among the cosmetics, holding a little brown tube in its gloved hand. As I headed down the sidewalk, I was confident that my alarm had been raised, not by the black man, but by some white woman.

A little later, I found myself in a fast food restaurant, in a cramped bathroom stall. Because the floor had been fouled by many wet shoes, and the rim of the toilet was flecked with urine and sprinkled with a few curly hairs, what should have been a simple operation of putting on a fresh pair of underwear was now hindered by my fear of touching anything. As I contorted and struggled in the stall, I accused myself of being an unusual man, one who lacked a proper regard for his own appearance, because most people, especially women, had regular dressing habits implicitly governed by a principle of self-respect. For some reason, I recalled, from a hundred years ago, the pretty, gimpy girl named Gerty MacDowell whose chief care, among all the dainty particulars of her attire, was her undies, and how on the summer day when she’d worn her blue pair for luck, she’d inadvertently ushered in the modern world, before limping away. Perhaps I was exaggerating a little the historical significance of her dinky set of blue panties with the pretty stitchery and ribbons, but it was difficult for me to imagine that she or any other girl, from any generation, would ever find herself leaning her shoulder against the scratched and graffiti-scrawled wall of a narrow bathroom stall, awkwardly using one arm to hold up her disrobed gabardine pants, and with the help of her other hand, trying to step into a pair of briefs without brushing them along the floor or hooking them with her foot — all the while, just on the other side of the partition, someone flatulently strained and plunked, between his groans, several small, hard balls into the toilet water. When I finally righted myself, and was holding the tab of my zipper between my thumb and forefinger, I decided to take the opportunity to relieve myself. As I urinated, I began to think about the discrete parts of Claudia Jones, wondering if even she, with all the luridness of her commodified and fragmented flesh, possessed enough control over her own life to keep herself from ever being forced to sleep, shower, and dress in public places. Vanessa Somerset probably wouldn’t have suspected that I was such a desultory man. After I left the bathroom and purchased a cup of coffee, I went back outside, vowing to myself that I would never again be so negligent of my own wellbeing. I wanted to rekindle in my breast that feeling of strength and normalcy that Vanessa had sparked the previous night.

Even though the social worker’s dreadful office above the wig shop was nearby Crowley’s pair of stores, I decided to visit Vanessa at that very moment, while I still had the nerve. Rather than spend more money on a new outfit, I would go as I was. Once I got there, I could put on my own clothes: the slacks, the light gray button-down shirt, the sports jacket, and the charcoal colored overcoat.

Thus, around noon on a bitter cold Wednesday in December, I took the sort of courageous action that I supposed would have been respected by the joyriding, helmet-less black man on the motorcycle. By the time I got near the bottom of my coffee, I was half-hoping to see him burst thunderously out of a side street and, with his front wheel skimming along the pavement and spewing slush in all directions, race out of sight and sound, like some indefatigable hero from Camelot to cowboy, riding ever and so long into the dustless, meridian farewell.

With my hat slanted across my brow, a stick of deodorant in one pocket, some new underwear in the other, and a paper coffee cup in hand, I set out to encounter a new life. I was headed toward Crowley’s, and if a pair of dogs barked at me this time, I was ready to bark back at them. Cars parked along the street were still covered in a layer of snow from the previous night, snow capped the railings and window ledges, and out of the mouths of gutters snaked tendrils of ice.

Although I ordinarily lack both pluck and resolve, I sensed that Vanessa Somerset was having a strange influence over me, as if the warm glow of last night’s kiss hadn’t faded just yet — even though, somewhere in the back of my mind, I dimly feared that it eventually would, and then the timid toad in me would reemerge and leap back into its cesspool. But meanwhile, I needed to plod on because I imagined that if I could keep plodding and allow the momentum of this newly found masculinity to carry me forward, then I might be able to break out of my prolonged moratorium in adolescence and, thus, finally mature into another stage of life, not just on a warm, cozier level, but as a full-blown adult.

Of course, this wasn’t the first time I had these thoughts; in fact, on the very day I had followed my landlord down the corridor and watched him knock two times, hard, on Claudia Jones’s door, I had told myself that all I needed was packed in my single suitcase and that my new apartment was going to be my new chance at life. I was going to set my sails toward a western exile, like some lone seaman aboard his meager skiff, and if neither a mermaid, a fish, a seabird, nor a barnacle would give me a hand, I’d man my rod alone, tend my sails, and without regrets, attempt to gaff whatever might suit my pleasure. However, before I even had enough time to plot my course, let alone push off from the dock, the boy had slimed his way into my apartment, staining my couch and spewing and slathering himself upon my bathroom floor.

Even so, I wasn’t disheartened by my awareness that the vitality that now motivated me was, in fact, closely fashioned after similar episodes in my life. I was running away and starting over, just as I had done before, but simple logic dictated that hope needed to repeat itself for at least one last time in order for the final rebirth to have a permanent existence. Seeing Crowley’s awning up ahead, I continued forward, imagining for an instant that if I were to look back, I’d behold a sidewalk strewn with a series of miscarriages and the aborted carcasses of my past.

When I came closer to the pair of side-by-side doors, with the myriad of stickers on the glass, I began to feel a greater intimacy with Vanessa, for she also seemed to be a person who had failed to progress and had been living trapped in a single moment for fifteen years. As I reached my hand out for the door, I suddenly realized that maybe part of the legal settlement of her divorce had kept her ex-husband nearby, in the other half of Crowley’s, where he could nurse his affection for popular music and watch over his ex-wife. Just as it had taken her a long time to admit that her marriage had been stifling the best parts of herself, maybe she was now prepared to have a similar revelation about the clothing store — and another drastic escape was possibly at hand.