Salvatore Scibona - The End

The fear of being called by name in a crowded place.

She stood fast until it was no longer plausible that she couldn’t hear them, and then for one second longer. The dread of the faces that knew her face. Then the faces themselves, taking her in.

There she is. The hair is different, it’s faded. You expected that. Mercy is to be resisted at all costs. Make the face. Just like that. Freeze your jaw in exactly that position. Do not lift the eyebrows, your wrinkles will show. Giddyup. Don’t let Patrizia get ahead of you. It’s not faded, of course, her hair (she’s coming into focus); it’s part black and part white.

Hold the face.

There she is.

Here she is.

She’s skinny. Outside it’s New Year’s Eve, with the snow squalls aswirl and the bone-chilling temperatures, and yet she has no coat or hat or earmuffs. Her dress, which she isn’t wearing so much as it’s hanging off her, is yellow with blue stripes and is hideous and unironed. Her shoelaces, however, are double knotted the way you showed her. The skin of the face is the color of an undershirt that needs bleaching. The skin of the neck has begun to pucker like a sock that’s fallen below the calf. You fail to detect remorse in the eyes, in the mouth, or in the posture.

But now here she is, face-to-face. You take her hands. You feel the presence of sex in yourself as an infected organ, and you want to open up your flesh and cut it out.

You struggle to steel your resolve. You struggle to keep at the forefront of your mind the senses in which she is at fault, but here she is, face-to-face, and you are forgetting all of them but one, that you are a me. And I have a face, too, see it? And I was left behind.

One thing.

One enormous thing that had included her but didn’t now. It broke apart and came together again in a smash and broke apart continually. Each time it came together again, a small part of it wrenched itself away.

What became of the part? It traveled through empty space. It was not aware of any trajectory.

What had become of her poor father? No one had even heard a word.

What had become of her?

The woman had redepicted in her mind certain moments from the past so many times that it was impossible to distinguish the moments as they had happened from her remembering of them: Imagine a house repainted with a hundred thousand coats, under which the original wood has rotted away; and yet the house still stands, composed now entirely of paint. The moment itself may not have mattered anymore. It may have been trivial to begin with, but the act of redepicting the scene for herself, changing it each time over decades, had trained her thoughts around a central mystery in it.

In one such scene she was a girl standing under the laundry line on the packed dirt of their yard, a clothespin between her teeth and her father’s wet undershirts hanging from her arm, when suddenly the projectionist of the film of which she was the subject changed the reels. There were two projectors, the second standing at the ready for the proper moment, and the change was seamless, but she had noticed it. She had entered an infinitely precise model of her own backyard, but she knew all the same that she was not in the same place. Whatever underlay seeing, hearing, smelling, whatever people meant when they said the laundry basket was “over there,” whatever they meant by there, had changed.

And then again, behind the wood shop at a missionary school where she had worked until two years ago — it had looked like Wyoming and smelled like Wyoming, but she knew she wasn’t in Wyoming, she was in a place not far from where she was standing right now on the platform, in this city.

The way people didn’t mean the same thing when they said “location” as when they said “place.” They said “place” meaning the self of the location.

The present scene risked someday becoming one of those scenes. It was moving too fast, she wanted to slow it down. She had exactly one chance to witness it as it was taking place. Not even one. Her painting of it would become all it was.

The women approached, and Lina turned and looked at them. Her mother’s eyes were so hidden behind the bloated lids that it was doubtful whether she could see anything. Mrs. Marini’s eyes were enormous behind new, thicker glasses, her cheeks and lips and eyelids and eyebrows made up in a way that made her look like a grim clown, her mouth quivering. Lina was astounded at how old they were. She was astounded that she even knew who they were, because they looked so different now.

The way people said, “she,” “you,” “I,” and they didn’t mean only bodies or faces, they meant her self, your self, my self.

And she could tell they were doing the same thing she was doing. They were looking for the self behind her changed face, as she was looking for the selves behind their changed faces.

“You look like disaster,” her mother said.

Mrs. Marini took Lina’s hands in her hands and then took Lina’s head in her hands. The old woman’s little nostrils opened wider; her lips flared, disclosing the gray teeth. Lina watched the eyes go opener, everything open, the face unmasked and savage. The old woman pulled Lina’s face to her face still closer. Maybe Lina was about to be bitten on the face. The wet breath of this woman on her skin. Lina’s own eyes going crossed. Then trying to pull away and the old woman yanking her face back closer still, to the face that belonged to the self of this person she had gone away from.

They walked out of the station. A crowd of smartly dressed Negroes was milling in Public Square under the candy-cane Christmas lights and the plastic holly boughs that were stapled to the trees. Snow was falling. In the center of the square stood a greenish black monument in which life-sized soldiers were carved wearing the garb of the last century. Some held rifles and some torches; others appeared to be tearing up a railroad. Perched atop the monument’s pedestal, a woman in stone, dwarfing the soldiers and the people in the square, gripped a sword in one hand, while in the other, the palm upturned and limp, a clump of snow had amassed; one of her breasts was exposed. At a corner of the square was a dais and banner that Lina couldn’t read through the darkness and the snowfall. They turned onto Coshocton Street, which led to the lake several blocks below, and the wind crashed into them, and the snow fell harder and laterally.

She was clothed for springtime and it was snowing, but she did not feel cold. The cloud cover was complete and low and orange with city light. Her mother was wearing a translucent plastic babushka. Mrs. Marini wore nothing on her head but a huge nimbus of a wig, which was snow speckled. Lina felt the snow melting on her shoulders. It stuck in her eyelashes. Her nose began to run. They walked in the street, using parked cars to steady themselves. The wind fell off momentarily. The snow continued to come down. She was going to have to see the boy soon.

Her mother drove them east, out of downtown, pulled into the parking lot of a VFW post, put the truck in neutral, and stomped down the parking brake, waiting for a snowplow to tail home. She asked some desultory questions concerning Had the trip been very long, Was it warmer in Pittsburgh than here, How about a little lip gloss on that kisser.

Mrs. Marini sat dumbly between them, crouching, sucking her teeth. The inquisition was coming, the target was within range. Lina perceived this as you perceive an invisible pursuer hunting you through woods in a dream. She was to be peeled and butchered; her parts would be arrayed, trimmed of fat, spitted, roasted, and consumed.

She could hear her blood rushing behind her eyes. She pressed her face against the window to cool it. She had made a purse to put herself in out of rag patches and chewing gum, and now they were going to try to spill her out.