Salvatore Scibona - The End

He kept on walking to the school. None of the trees down here were in bloom. The shortest route into the valley was a one-way cobblestone street called Reckless Avenue. He descended the cliff at top speed. His feet were wheels.

A mist rose from the city, a slow exhalation from a great dying animal.

The yellowish morning air browned as he approached the blast furnaces on the flats, down at the bottom of the shale valley walls, and he was trying to train himself to notice things like this, perversities, that the air itself was a sort of military-uniform color, khaki, you called it. He’d discovered the color of city air on the farm, perversely, where the air was colorless. He had trouble seeing what was right in front of him. Khaki came from Urdu for “dustlike.”

There were taverns across the street from the mountainous steel mills amid which West Seventh Avenue passed. And depending on what time he went by there he caught either the third-shift men heading mill to bar or the first shift heading bar to mill.

He cut through a brickyard and through a hospital parking lot and through the SJs’ vegetable garden and then was at the school.

Nino and Ricky were waiting for him behind the boiler room.

It was 7:15 in the morning.

Nino, scratching his back on the quoin blocks, said, “Hello, Eminence.”

The matinal meeting of the Gentlemen’s Smoking Society commenced. They had waited for him, which he appreciated.

Nothing important was going to happen today.

He looked at Nino.

Nino had a broad, glum face. His dad was the sergeant at arms of the local to which Ciccio’s father had belonged. He had a twin called Cornflake, or Corny, even by the mother, supposedly. This twin lived in a state home for retarded children, where he was visited twice weekly by his mother and brothers but not by the father. Ciccio had never seen the twin. He suspected the twin was a hoax, only Nino’s was a face you thought incapable of lying. There was a theme in its construction — the eye placement that was a fraction of an inch too far toward the temples, the sharply protruding jaw, the downward point of the corners of his mouth — the theme being that he had the face of a big, guileless trout. Ciccio hadn’t seen this before just now.

He looked at Ricky. He didn’t know what Ricky looked like. He was looking right at Ricky and couldn’t see anything other than brown hair, blue blazer, dandruff on the blazer. How long had he known Ricky, and he couldn’t say what he looked like?

He was trying to notice perversities. It wasn’t hard. They were everywhere. Grotesqueries. He had recently approached the bathroom mirror, tape measure in hand, in the coolest scientific spirit, unsuspecting he would find anything definitive but needing a control sample for his research into the grotesque. And he’d found, mirabile visu, and not without a certain prideful shock, that his own features were crookedly affixed to his face, that that was what was the matter with it. And he had not been aware. And he imagined that real manhood, freedom, would mean that all these mysteries that he couldn’t see were mysteries because they were too close to him would reveal themselves. He would be permitted to see what had from the start been hiding right out here in the open.

They finished their cigarettes and went on into the school.

Then it was April.

Then it was May.

He needed something to happen, but that was irrelevant, his need was irrelevant. It was imperative that something should happen. No, it was manifest that something was going to happen. A substance was being held in a provisional vessel, and the vessel wanted to burst. He had been reading in the hope of dissolving himself in the substance so that once the vessel burst he’d be carried away with the rest.

He was made to write a paper on Aristotle’s definition of motion. The definition was that motion, or change, was the coming into actuality of a potential insofar as it was a potential. He had gotten a grade of C-minus on the paper because he skipped the insofar as clause because he hadn’t understood it.

Father Manfred had scribbled a pencil note on the bottom of the last page referring him to the end of book iii, chapter 1, of the Physics, where he could find an example of what the insofar as clause was about. He was to be prepared to defend his understanding of the example for his oral examination that spring.

The exam took place in the courtyard between the laboratory classrooms and the SJs’ greenhouse. You had to go through the greenhouse to get to the courtyard. When you got to the courtyard, you found two canvas folding lawn chairs under a tree and Father Manfred in one of them, awaiting you. He had a pitcher of fruit punch on the grass and a stack of paper cups. Yellow jackets were dive-bombing the fruit punch, and while Ciccio talked, the priest was fishing them out, crushing them between his fingertips, and dropping them into a pocket in the skirt of his cassock.

The example of a potential that Ciccio had to explain was “building material”; a block, let’s say. When you were building something with it, it was in motion because you were bringing into actuality its potential to build. But, Ciccio said, if you were, say, throwing the block at a pear tree to knock down a pear, you couldn’t describe it as having anything to do with building; you could say the block was in motion as projectile, maybe, because you were actualizing its potential as projectable. Then he interrupted himself.

“Whenever I think I’m getting him,” Ciccio said, “him, Aristotle, right away I says to myself, That can’t be right, that’s so — what’s the word — dumb, how could it be worth his trouble to say it?”

Father Manfred said, “No, but you’re right. This is how Aristotle feels. He is observation. He has a bottom. Saint Paul also has a bottom. Now, if I were to tell you that whenever I found myself believing I understood Philosopher X, I felt a pang of dread, I knew I was about to be plunged into deeper unknowing because the teaching of Philosopher X is bottomless, then I am describing whom?”

“Plato,” Ciccio said.

“Yes, and?”

“Jesus Christ our Lord.”

“Yes, and?”

Ciccio picked at a mole that had recently come to light on his chin. “You want me to say Kierkegaard,” he said.

“All right, but you were saying. You were going somewhere.”

He tried again, but he got tangled up in the insofar as clause and smacked himself on his mouth.

The priest said, “Paraphrase using a different example and without using the words potential or actual. ”

Ciccio said, “There’s a man in prison. He dreams of escaping — colorful dreams, where the authorities are chasing him. Then he wakes up. He busts the lock and starts to escape, but it isn’t like the dream at all. No dogs are after him. No sirens. The guards are asleep. He’s escaping, but not insofar as he dreamt of escaping.” He added, more to himself than to the old man, “So, like a dope, he turns around and locks himself back up again.”

“I don’t follow,” said the priest absently, rattling the mucus in his throat. He looked aside. In their pink and swollen orbits, his eyes floundered, tracing the path of a zigzagging object that Ciccio couldn’t see.

“When the prisoner becomes free, he can’t dream of being free anymore,” he said. “Like as in, the dream exists only in dreaming it.”

“Little blackguard thought he could sting me!” said the priest.

One of the yellow jackets had just landed on the back of his neck, where it met its death.

“You’re going to have to repeat that. I beg your pardon. I had distracted myself,” he said.

Ciccio repeated himself.