Salvatore Scibona - The End

There was no will. He was a minor still. His mother would get everything.

He cleaned the house on New Year’s Eve while the old ladies were at the station (Ricky was with him, but Ricky was no help), stopping to touch in parting tribute the brocaded buttons of the seat cushions and the newel where he hung his shoulder pads to air them out after practice. Good-bye, number 123 Twenty-second Street. Hello, the rails.

Ricky went home.

Ciccio was alone in the house, and they were due back any minute, the women. He had to get out. He left a note saying he was at Ricky’s for the night. Assuming they didn’t call to verify, he had a head start of at least twelve hours before whomever they sent looking for him was sent looking (unless their plan had always been to gently suggest he make himself scarce and to send no one after him when he did).

He had nowhere to go. He had aspired to this. He was fifteen and broke and homeless. It felt like he was borrowing a bum’s rags to say he was broke. A kid can’t be broke because a kid isn’t supposed to have any money of his own. You wouldn’t say your dog was broke. But he was going to need to buy food and pay rent and he had no money for these things, so he was legitimately broke.

He had nowhere to go.

How to say: I mean this, this is a fact, this is more than what it feels like? I’ve packed a bag with spare socks and only one set of extra shoes because I don’t know how far I’ll have to carry the bag. But I have nowhere to go with this bag on my back.

There was an invisible membrane between a child’s world and the world of grown people. The child’s was hypothetical; the adult’s was actual. The child’s world was only an image. It had none of the actual machinery that made the actual world go. You didn’t have to have any money. Nobody would put you in jail. Your work was school. You didn’t produce anything real. You produced term papers, the graph of a hyperbola, which were pretend. Therefore the sometimes happiness of work on the farm, in which he felt the pleasing tension of labor that authentically needed to happen. The republic needed grapes for its jelly sandwiches. But he was at the farm only on weekends and school vacations. The farm was ancillary. He was somebody other than himself there. If somebody should ask him what his occupation was, he couldn’t say “farmer.” He was a kid, he was potential, like an egg. When the make-believe-ness of his existence dawned on him, he wanted out. But they wouldn’t let him out until he’d become a nuisance to them, and then they’d forced him out.

It was late and snowing and New Year’s Eve, so there was no hope of a trolley. He set out on foot. He didn’t turn around to see if the house he was walking away from was lost to him yet, behind the snowfall.

How to say: I am out, I have taken on substance, I am not made of mist, I have — in fact — no place to go? Why, now that he was in the actual world, couldn’t he perceive the weight he knew it had? Why did everything feel as hypothetical as before?

A teacher, Father Delano, had accused him of having a Manichean head, which coming from him was a slur, but it was true. Ciccio did his mental business as if the world was composed of two factions warring with each other. He felt them in his heart all the time. Present experience bore this out. The forces of Darkness were galloping over this town, and therefore get out, right? Here he was now, on the corner of Twenty-second and Eleventh Avenue, facing the blank-eyed concrete statue of Columbus that the K of C had erected in front of the basketball court, and there were two ways only to go — up the hill or down the hill. He chose down.

No, up.

He chose up.

He was wearing a black wool cap of his father’s, a flannel scarf, the leather work gloves he used when they pounded posts at the farm, a three-quarter-length wool coat over a raincoat over a school blazer over a thermal undershirt over a T-shirt. He also wore dungarees, thermal underpants, and his clodhopper winter school shoes with galoshes over them.

The K of C had called off the New Year’s Eve fireworks, said a sign slung around the great man’s neck; a storm was predicted. Ciccio saw not a soul on the avenue. The wind at his back pushed him up the hill. He told himself the wind approved of what he was doing, that it was abetting his escape.

Nobody knew where he was going. There was no motion of animal life along the street for as far up the hill as he could see, nor in the trees.

Look at the snow coming down. And you might know all about its formation in the atmosphere, but when you looked up it appeared to come from nowhere, to materialize. Everything was blue, the snow, rooming houses he knew in daylight were red brick. They were the blue of snowfall at night. Something was the matter with the sky. He figured it out. It was lower, it was falling, it was enclosing this place like a lid on a box.

He had to get away.

There was this tremendous snowfall happening, this absolute blanketing, or rather erasure, of the streets. It was irrelevant to notice the swell in the snow under which he knew a fire hydrant was, or to notice any other individual thing. A mystic cataclysm was taking place. Individual physical existence was being wiped out.

He wanted to disappear.

Look, here was the snow materializing ex nihilo, what a word. And he had wanted to feel that happening to him. He’d believed that once he got on the road he’d feel himself taking on substance, becoming a thing instead of an idea. But he didn’t feel that. He didn’t feel heavier, he felt lighter.

He had to ask himself, What was the goal? Was it to become real, to exert force in the physical world, to have money, to be looked at instead of looked around, like people look around children?

Or was it to throw away the mirage of being real? To be looked through, to evanesce?

The snow was materializing out of nothing, and he wanted to do the trick in reverse. He was trudging up the hill, step and another step and another step, the wind pushing on his back.

He wanted to disappear into the trees. He was on top of the hill now, looking back. He wanted to leave no sign of himself. The snow kept falling. He wanted no one to remember having laid eyes on his face.

What happened was probably inevitable.

He made it on foot to the bus depot in Van Buren Heights, a distance of five miles, and fell gratefully to sleep on a bench.

He was not, once he woke up at daybreak, grateful for the wardrobe he was carrying on his body. He was trapped in an amniotic sac of sweat. Someone had turned on the current in the argon lamps overhead. An indigent struggled to topple a cigarette machine in an alcove beside the grated-over ticket window. The green air smelled of urine.

What happened was, he sat up in his sac on the bench and then a luminous angel took shape on his shoulder. The angel pointed out that absenting oneself from Ohio without warning anybody was not an unprecedented stunt and that he’d judged it severely in the past. Also, said the angel, was he really going to let his mother cast herself in the role of the respecter of the dead while he played the dead’s deserter? He was going to have to go back, said the voice of virtue, and sit through the funeral, and announce his intention to leave, and then leave.

The cigarette machine came smashing face-first to the floor. The man stood cursing it. The problem seemed to be penetrating his mind that, even if he’d succeeded in breaking the glass of the face, the cigarettes were now safely entombed under the shell of the machine unless he could lift it back up again. He collapsed onto his knees and began scratching at the sheet metal. It was piteous and difficult both to watch and not to watch. Ciccio saw he was alone with this man, in the depot.