Salvatore Scibona - The End

“At Ricky’s. I didn’t wake you up, I hope.” He had arrayed the makings of an elaborate omelet on the stove.

What strands of hair there were on her head came past her shoulders, were as thin as the fiber of a moth’s tent, did nothing at all to clothe the scalp. The scalp was yellow.

And her clothes would have fit somebody three times her weight. She might as well have wrapped a sheet around herself. He would have thought she slept in a nightgown if he’d had to guess. He had never seen her wearing white clothes before. They were some man’s old pajamas.

“What was I dreaming?” she said. “I can’t remember. I heard the door. I thought you were someone else.”

“I was at Ricky’s.” He was trying to get the tone of Hello, this is my phony alibi out of his voice and was failing. “And I came over to get the suit I left here after, after—”

“Put my egg down,” she said. “Go wash your hands.”

He washed his hands. She fried him some eggs and made him cut up half a grapefruit for himself and half for her. While he was cutting the grapefruit, she fixed him with a look that said, Shall I blow your cover or not, big fellow? Anyway, she didn’t blow his cover.

It was the first day of the funeral.

When he knew his mother would be at the mortuary, later that morning, he went home and took a shower and got into decent clothes. The house smelled weird. Then he went to the mortuary and ate a lot of cheese and sausage.

Yes, the usurper was there, perched like a crow in the front, by the coffins. Her hair had grayed. Maybe she would die soon. She even came up to him and shook his wretched hand, trying to act like she wasn’t cracked and wasn’t a usurper. He didn’t know who she thought she was fooling. Not him!

He fell asleep on Mrs. Marini’s sofa at four in the afternoon and didn’t wake up until an hour before sunrise. She had taken off his socks.

The next night he retrieved his crystal-radio set and a few pairs of Skivvies from Twenty-second Street and stowed them in the chest of drawers in Mrs. Marini’s upstairs guest bedroom, where he also slept. As long as nobody said anything, he figured he could build up a body of precedent, establish squatter’s rights, and never have to have a conversation about where, in the long term, he was going to hang his hat.

In fact, that was what happened. The house on Twenty-second Street wasn’t his mother’s, it was his, but he’d let her have it, he didn’t care. She wasn’t really his mother, she was a candy wrapper blowing around on the street.

He went back to school. Months passed.

He didn’t have to iron anymore or be a slave on his father’s side jobs. He was hungry all the time. He was mad, all the time, an uninterrupted clenching of the jaws and fists. Beating up on somebody, or even getting beaten up on, was his only relief. When his “mother” came around, which she did far too often, with that jeering puss on herself, it was all he could do not to knock her teeth out of her head.

He was a man. He felt fifty-five years old. He didn’t have to socialize with head cases. He was hungry all the time. Mrs. Marini thought three square was good enough for anybody, but he needed three cubed; he was having a growth spurt again, his stomach rumbled while he was cleaning the table after dessert. He’d discovered a topic she knew nothing about, an adolescent boy’s special nutritional needs. He couldn’t ask for more because what if then she got sick of having to shove so much of her monthly fixed income into his face and she made him go live at number 123? He obeyed to the letter all regulations concerning length of shower and Where do the dirty socks go? His cigarettes, he kept in a cellophane corn-chip bag in the leaf pile behind her toolshed.

He examined his shame. He poked at it. He experimented with ways of making it flare up or cool down. Where did it come from? It came from someplace in the constellation of My Father Is Dead but I Am Still Alive.

He wanted something to happen. He read more. It did not seem quite right to him that he should lose himself in reading, but he had nowhere else in the short term to go. It gave him no pleasure, but he didn’t want to be pleased. He wanted to be displeased, to feel the displeasure of his circumstances, because it did not seem right to him, no, it did not seem right at all, that his grief had all burned off before it could produce any effect. His grandmother had made loud, pulsing screams in her bedroom, a sound from the Dark Ages, while Ciccio kneaded the dough for their bread.

The Jesuits and his lay teachers forced him to read more, and he obeyed, stupid as a mill horse, hoping that if he got lost far enough then something would happen. He didn’t even care to be the agent of this thing. It was an accident that he found himself casting around in philosophy and religion for the thing that would happen. Those were the oats they were feeding him. If he had gotten into the union a few years ago, as planned, he would have lost himself in a hod or a wheelbarrow instead of in Thomas Aquinas.

During his winter oral exam that February, Father Manfred asked him, “If I told you I was both free and unfree at the same time, what would my rationale be?”

Well, said young Mazzone, we were made in God’s image, and you could make the case that God was for the most part free but not entirely so, since the list of things he couldn’t do was long. He could not come into being or pass out of being. He could not not be good. God was both free and unfree; we were made in God’s image; et cetera. How about that?

But, no, Father Manfred said, God could be and not be at once if he wanted. God didn’t mind contradicting himself. Try again.

All he could think of was to say: God is great. God is a mystery. God is like us and not like us.

“Yes, good, more,” the priest said.

“And if you’re a slave in your head? I mean, obviously you’re not free to fly to Mars on your own wings. It’s easy to say how you’re unfree outside your head. But what if you were unfree inside your head?”

“That’s it, play with that.”

“If you’re not free in your head—”

“Hit that. Slam away at it.”

“I am working a little harder, Father, because I am afraid.”

“Boom boom.”

“—then you never see how little sense it makes.”

“Nice. Go. Yes. Hit him. A left and a right.”

“Because it’s impossible that God exists, but he does. And unless you’re free in your head, you can’t see why it’s impossible.”

“And therefore look how much greater is God that he smashes even reason underfoot.”

Which, okay — there was the absurdly luminous shadow of paradox, believing because it was nonsense to believe. He knew they liked that sort of thing. So did he, to be honest. It made sense to him, ha ha.

He was at an impressionable junction and knew it. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas were beyond the edge of his understanding. Much of his thinking these days was only ingesting what the priests said and then vomiting it back up on his shirt and looking at the vomit and saying, Gee, look what I made.

His father had always told him to disregard every third word the Jesuits said. They were famous for twisting people’s heads. They made vice look like virtue. They had, as an order, been kicked out of the Church for a few decades a couple hundred years ago. And yet his father’s position was ambiguous, had been ambiguous. After all, he’d paid a lot of dough to send Ciccio to the school.

There was civics and there was trig, okay. You were discouraged from getting too excited about them, probably because they were relevant to the twentieth century. There was Latin, of course. There was Latin, Latin everywhere, from incunabulum to extremis. And this year there was Greek, too. They had Ciccio trudgingly translating Aristotle in one class; reading him at length in English in another; and reading Aquinas, talking about him, in another. It was the junior-year Aristo-blitzkrieg. His defenses were weakening, but defenses against what?