Salvatore Scibona - The End

Father Manfred said, “The attaining of the object of the quest always disappoints, you’re saying.” He made a grandly sarcastic fake yawn.

“I mean,” Ciccio said, “I might say to myself common-sensically, I long for what I long for. But, you know, the thing you longed for is never what you advertised. Obviously. And why is that? Maybe because you’d rather long for it than get it. Which is stupid.”

“You’re saying there’s something the matter with the sentence, ‘A potential is actualized,’ because the subject of the sentence can’t be what you say it is and also do what you say it does at the same time.”

“Okay, then, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Okay, but this is not at the same time. This is motion. This is change. There are miles per hour. Time is elapsing.”

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“I’m not trying to be rough with you, boy, but isn’t that too bad? Aristotle is not your enemy, motion is your enemy.”

“What are you saying, Father? I like motion.” In the space between them, Ciccio erratically waved his hand.

“All of this fills you with a terrific sense of misgiving, but you don’t know about what you have this misgiving. Tell me what you feel at the edge of your brain.”

He looked at the priest. One of the eyes appeared to be dead, but Ciccio couldn’t tell which one.

“What I feel at the edge of my brain, as in, I don’t know if I even agree with what I’m about to say—”

“Yes,” the priest said.

“—is bogus.”

“Good.”

“I feel trapped in bogusness. Every time I say to myself, Oh, look, that’s real, that over there — it turns out that it isn’t real, I just had an idea of a realness. But ideas aren’t real. Ideas are just ideas. I feel, what, double-crossed by my mind. The more I think, the more bogus everything becomes.”

“Which everything?”

“Everything. What I see, what I hope for, what I suspect.”

He looked around himself. The sky was green with twilight. There was a very fine drizzle. The tree hanging over them — he knew what it was called, it was a black locust — was dropping hundreds of tiny white blossoms onto the shoulders and the lap of the priest, who noticed this and was bemused. He plucked a few of the yellow-jacket carcasses out of his pocket and bounced them idly with some of the locust petals in the lap of his skirt. It had to be the colors he was looking at, the severity of the contrast between the deeply white flowers, his deeply black garment, and the deeply yellow and glossy stripes encircling the thorax of each lifeless wasp. Every Ohio schoolboy knows you do not call this thing a bee, you call it a wasp. The priest was clean shaven. He had the exploded capillaries at the tip of the bulbous nose that you associate with drunks.

“Let me ask you something else,” the priest said.

Ciccio said, “All right, Father.”

“What are we making you read all this stuff for, do you think?”

“When you say for, I don’t think I know what you mean.”

“Here is what I mean. I’ll tell you. Sometimes when I’m eating an ice cream, I don’t care whether it’s a real ice cream, or whether I’m really tasting it,” the priest said. “But sometimes I care very much. Now, I am a Catholic, you remember, and I believe some pleasures are better than others. And I believe I can cultivate some desires and starve out others. So, supposing I had to choose between the great pleasure of tasting an ice cream with a brain gone smooth, empty of thought, and the great pleasure of, er. . knowing that I don’t know what an ice cream is, or what taste is, and feeling the desire to know — id est, the dreadful reaching out of my consciousness toward the force that governs the world outside it — which of these desires ought I to cultivate?”

“That’s some riddle you guys made up to catch Jews in the Inquisition.”

“A, B, both A and B, neither A nor B?”

“Do you want to see my horns, Father?”

“Put another way, one might ask, Is it better to feel or to think?”

“That’s easy!” Ciccio said. “To feel.”

The voice on the line was male, croaking, forthright, unquestionably Palermitano, stentorian, and sad. In the background, Lina heard someone raking gravel.

The man said, “You’re selling a bicycle.”

“Yes, go on.”

“I have the correct number for the woman that’s selling a bicycle?”

“All I do is answer the phone,” Lina said.

“From this point, the transaction proceeds how, I don’t know.”

“You have a conversation face-to-face.”

“We are who?”

“You, the person for whom you wish to buy the bicycle, the friend of mine who’s selling.”

“I don’t get it. What are you doing picking up her phone? What kind of an operation is this? You’re her, aren’t you — I mean, it’s your own bicycle, isn’t it.”

Evidently he was an outsider of the neighborhood, the accent notwithstanding. No one that lived here would have needed to ask if the bicycle was hers. “I’ll talk to my friend about a place and a time,” she said.

“We’re discussing dollars and cents at this meeting?”

“The price is fixed. Up for discussion is whether this bicycle is a good idea in this circumstance. If your friend has been in need of the bicycle longer than twelve weeks, I’m afraid my friend can’t help her.”

“I might say, ‘Don’t worry. I have no doubts this is the right bicycle. Let’s skip to the heart of the matter.’”

“I don’t think my friend is willing to sell her bicycle on those terms,” Lina said.

“A place and a time,” said the man.

“Call back in ten minutes and I’ll let you know.”

“It would be helpful if the place was West Side. There is a little park someplace. There is a little park, actually, on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Auglaize Street.”

“I’m writing this down.”

She hung up the phone and rang Mrs. Marini’s line.

Mrs. Marini said she could do it at ten a.m. the next day.

Lina hung up the phone, smoked a cigarette, knocked over her salt shaker, righted it, swept the salt into her hand; and the phone rang again.

“Tell me it’s better if I don’t attend this meeting myself,” said the man.

“Sir. I pick up the phone, then I put it back down. Do you understand?”

“Well, maybe I won’t come then myself, maybe. Maybe I’ll go do something else, if it’s all the same maybe to you, and let the girl talk to you on her own.”

“That’s as you please,” Lina said, positioning herself in front of the opened window so that when she threw the salt over her shoulder it landed outside in the grass. She asked how her friend would know his friend.

There were some benches around a broken-down fountain, he said. And the girl would have a schnauzer pup on a leash.

The next morning, for a diversion, Lina tagged along with Mrs. Marini on the trolley ride. Wisconsin Avenue was the principal thor oughfare of a neighborhood that had used to be called Old Marsh, or the Bottom Marsh, or the Bottoms. Twice, maybe three times, as a young girl, she’d overheard a very old person on the streetcar say he was getting off at “the Bottoms” or coming from there. It was a name from a lost era. Mrs. Marini was among the last who still called it by its succeeding name, The Hague. Lina herself had always known it as New Odessa, but that name wasn’t long for this world, either. When she and Mrs. Marini crossed Tooley Boulevard, they discovered that the windows of the shops on Auglaize Street were covered with pressboard, the Cyrillic neons were shut off, and they were heading into a part of town where neither of them would have agreed to go if they’d known better.