Salvatore Scibona - The End

They were indoors but there was no heat.

Then the angel of Darkness appeared on his other shoulder and castigated him. Going back was a dodge, it was an excuse to let the iron cool, the more ineffectually to strike it later on. He would get comfortable, he would lose his nerve, he would betray himself.

The man had pissed himself and was scratching very delicately with his long fingernails at the back of the machine.

Ciccio pushed the depot doors into the snowdrifts and squeezed himself outside. The snow had evidently fallen all night, and it was still falling, although the wind out of the northwest had died off, so he wouldn’t have to face into it. He headed back to the neighborhood and spent the day in getting there.

It was 1953. There was snow inside his socks. With every step, his guardian angel of Darkness abused him. What had taken four hours to walk last night looked like it was going to take fifteen today, and yet his strength was superhuman. He had not eaten and didn’t want to eat.

There was all day through the tedium of the snow-buried streets to examine his shame. He felt it, he was ashamed. He didn’t understand what it was. It wasn’t the kind of shame where you’re worried how others look at you. He felt shame and didn’t know what it was coming from, what purpose it was serving. He had to examine it. It was a warning of some kind. It was his heart warning his will of something. That was as far as he could get with it.

In the last week he had become a grown man. The vapors of grief he may have felt before were being incinerated to power the dynamo of his long, thick, persistent legs.

By the time he’d made it into Eastpark, with two miles still to go, it was night again. The physical extremity of his circumstances started to exert its pressure. He wanted to rest, he wanted to eat something. He’d been on his feet since the previous night, with a break, to sleep on the bench, that was about half his normal sleep allotment with respect to time. He had to rest, he had to eat something. He didn’t know where these things might happen.

He had mushed into and across Eastpark, mostly by way of shortcuts through the woods. There was less snow on the forest floor than in the backyards or the streets — which the plows had yet to scratch — because so much of the snow was still hanging in the trees. He sat down on what looked like an oil drum, in the woods. He needed to sleep. He wondered if he could figure out how to construct an igloo of some kind.

There was a complicated system of living things on the forest floor beneath the snow, many of which things he had formal names for or made-up childhood names for, but most of which he had failed even to notice — and the snow had erased them all. There was nothing to see here but sky, snow, and the bones of the trees. The scene was vast and clear, and he was no part of it. He felt incidental and scared. Some places were better to look away from than to look at.

He would feel better when he knew where he was going.

He had where to go? No place. The usurper would be in his house by now. He asked himself first where in the short run, then where in the long run, he could go. From olden times the death of parents had forced young men into the wilderness to make their keeps. There were still parcels of land open to homesteading in western Canada. It was two a.m., said the bell of the church, the only perceivable evidence of the neighborhood; otherwise the woods seemed to him like the aboriginal Ohio of French and Indian War days. He was trying and failing not to look at this beautiful scene, of which he was not a part and could never be a part. It was silly to look at this place and call it a wilderness when he knew it was a trapezoidal park bordered on all sides by streets, when, furthermore, he knew the names of the streets. A wilderness was by definition wild and unpeopled. This place was fenced off in order to look wild but wasn’t really wild. And he — a person — was, at least materially, in it. He wanted to recede into wilderness, but there was perhaps no wilderness left. There were only places where people were and places where people had not yet gotten around to being. If there was a wilderness anywhere, it was in his mind.

At last the snowfall broke, the moon emerged, and stars. There was no suggestion of wind in the tops of the pines, and he was footsore and starved and numb of face. He gave in. There was a miserably reasonable and boy-souled answer to the question of where he could go in the short run, and he had no choice at this point. He was too cold. He was in retreat. He descended the slope of the woods, out of the frontier, down to Chagrin Avenue, and made a right on Twenty-sixth and stole through Mrs. Marini’s cyclone-cellar doors.

He tiptoed into the cellar guest bedroom, the one no one ever used, with the locked cabinets and the sink. It took him fifteen minutes to undress and hide his clothes under the adjustable hospital bed down there. Then he lay in the bed an hour or two, somehow unsleeping, composing in his thoughts the list of grievances that made it impossible for him to stay there, while his shivering slowly subsided, sensation returned to his toes, and his will to leave took leave of him.

He may have been sleeping but probably not when he heard the newspaper thump against the storm door upstairs — a thump that held out bluntly all the comforts he wished to wish to do without: routine, insulation from cold, fresh meat, people to talk to.

He got up and made the bed as he had found it and climbed the stairs in his stocking feet, his shoes in hand, dressed for a moderate trek through a winter night but having left most of his clothes hidden in the cellar. Outside her kitchen windows it was still dark. It was darker than when he’d come in. The moon must have set by now. All the lights were off inside the house.

He needed a plan. One or another of the women was going to make him account for his whereabouts the last two nights, and the truth was none of their goddamn business.

He needed a bath. There was just enough light in the kitchen that certain unidentifiable metal objects in the stove region of the room gleamed spookily. Where did the light come from? From the windows, having reflected off the snow, having shot out of stars many, many millions of lifetimes of light travel away.

It was safe to assume that if they hadn’t called Ricky’s the first night he was gone, they would probably have called there by now. The question was going to be, Where has Ciccio been? He was going to say he was at Ricky’s the whole time, both nights. Then they would say, Oh, no, you weren’t, we called, we have found you out. At which point he would say what?

He was overthinking this. They weren’t going to fight with him. They were trying to put him on the street.

To get to her front door, he was obliged to feel his way along the kitchen counter. He opened the door, and he opened the storm door. He bent over the threshold and dug out the paper and mussed up his shoes in fresh snow. He was operating in near-perfect silence. He placed the snow-covered shoes on the rug inside the door. It was a crude ruse but it would have to suffice.

Now he could invite the audience into the theater.

He squared his feet on the linoleum and slammed the door shut. He banged a skillet down on the stove. He paused to listen for signs of the audience coming and, hearing none, dropped her coffee grinder on the floor and faked a sneeze.

He listened again. There was a creaking of the floorboards.

Slowly and white Mrs. Marini materialized amid the darkness of the hallway.

“Where did you come from?” she said. She was white, he wanted to say see-through, as if gaseous. Her pajamas were white and patched in a dozen places and nearly disintegrated. She wore a look of small-animal fright that he had not before seen on her.