Salvatore Scibona: The End

And he had chosen this country, this city, this house where he was heading. And having chosen them, he might choose some other place to live. But for a child, for his children, who’d only ever lived in these six rooms, their house was nothing they’d chosen, it was a fact their father had taught them. A fact he would now tell them had never been true, had been just a useful canard. And it wasn’t useful anymore.

He turned left on Twenty-second. The wind struck his face squarely. Who was going to clear the street of snow and trash when Eddie and his brood were gone?

He’d get what for the house (that there were nectarine trees — in Ohio! — which he’d made to bloom on his property, that there was not a crooked shingle or a window needing more than the tap of a finger to open or close, that there was the brickwork recently repointed by his own hand) — he’d get what? A pittance.

You know from whom we are getting the pittance, don’t you? After today, after what he’d seen happen, what he’d seen those people do (almost seen), who else was going to be chump enough to buy here? Leave the trash in the street. Why not. Let them have the whole place the way they liked it.

Down the block, his doomed abode — the twin dormers, the stink pipe, the slow pitch of the porch roof — was utterly dark, was a silhouette of itself, betrayed no signs that his wife and children had yet returned.

But his mood didn’t have time to sink accordingly, for who was this, and what were they up to? In the street beneath the lamp ahead was a man in a plaid shirt and dungarees, still as stone, and a boy off to his right. Just standing there. Facing Mazzone’s old house that the wife had returned and was living in it now.

What was of interest that they were watching? He couldn’t see. It was beyond the far edge of the pool of lamplight where they were standing. The brilliance of the lamp made what was not beneath it all the harder to descry.

It was a fox, perhaps (he went heel-toe in under the lamp, breathing soundlessly with his mouth open), an animal they were taking pains not to spook. He was in the pool of light now, he was within arm’s reach of the man with the plaid shirt. There was too much light and in the wrong place, but his eyes were making their automatic calculations, attuning themselves. He saw the thing moving, a human figure, or two figures, perhaps, niddle-noddling toward the perimeter of the pool.

“But what’s this we’re watching?” he whispered.

The man started, not evidently having heard Eddie’s approach, and made a weak-wristed gesture of incomprehension.

Eddie said in his best English this time, “What are we watching?” as the cone of light seemed to expand, and what they were watching, the figures, assumed substance, became actual, as a needle does when it pierces the skin.

“Sorry, what?”

And the man, grizzle-faced and fat, repeated it yet again, his stertorous voice lowering, an edge of impatience in it, pointing with each syllable back over Gary’s shoulder at the colored women, but it was all still less penetrable than the first time.

“I don’t understand you. Could you repeat? English?” Gary said.

And the fat man said it again, this time pointing at him, and then at his kid, and then at himself.

Gary pressed on the top of his hair with his sweaty hand and squinted. “One more time? Okay?”

And whatever it was, the angry fat man said it again, pointing at Gary’s eyes and then pointing at his own eyes.

Possibly it was in English and that was why he wasn’t getting it.

The niggers were getting away.

“I, my kid, here, visit,” Gary said.

But the fat man loosed a long string of strident words, loud, and poked him in the chest with a finger, and said the original thing yet another time.

Gary heard a whimpering sound. There was also an odor, faintly ammoniac. He turned and looked down. The kid was crying. The eyes brimmed, and the kid blinked, and the tears popped out.

The kid had pissed his pants.

Lina looked with pride and disgust at the night’s wage on her telephone table. The bills were crisp, although the dates printed on them were all from before the war. There were also three rolls of dimes bound with a shoelace.

She was standing alone under the balustrade, looking at the money, when Mrs. Marini telephoned from the barbershop. Pippo the Barber was in the room with her, evidently.

“How did your tart turn out, my treasure?” the old woman asked.

“Federica said it was fine.”

“And you’ve washed the dishes by now?”

“The woman was resting and then she left a couple of minutes ago, and we’re all cleaned up,” Lina said. “Freddie’s already gone home.”

“Did you eat it?”

Lina thought a minute. “Yes,” she said.

After she hung up the phone, she looked at the money some more. She was unsure what to do with it. She stood thinking, her fingernail in her teeth. Then, in a wicked stroke, like a knife jabbed into the hinge of an oyster and briskly twisted so that the hidden creature is exposed to the open air, she made up her mind:

She was going to stay here. She was going to live in this house for many years to come. She was going to learn this trade and make her living from it. And she was going to take this money downtown and spend it.

She needed a coat for the winter.

Donna Costanza severed Ciccio’s leash with a house key. They were on the sidewalk in front of the barbershop. Mr. Pippo the Barber said, “The Russians are coming, but where are the sirens for air raid?” The heat had broken. There was a steady wind coming from the direction of downtown, from west-northwest, and Ciccio was thinking, No, it wasn’t atomical conflict coming, it was a cyclone. Wax paper and tinfoil climbed the wire fence enclosing the courtyard of the convent, and fell down, and climbed back up in the wind. North of the equator the direction of the spiral of a cyclone is unfailingly counterclockwise.

She asked Mr. Pippo if she could use his phone, and the two of them went inside, and Ciccio stayed out.

Unless he was just experiencing the humdrum cool of night having fallen. How to save the appearances? How to account for Everybody had been here and now nobody was here?

Ciccio sat down on the curb, feeling this was a brave thing to do, to settle himself, to be still and quiet in the midst of this place so many had just fled, aware of a peril on its way of which he himself was ignorant. Thinking there was a power he could have by virtue of what he didn’t understand.

He was on the curb in this place of stupefying sameness that now had become an entirely other place, phantasmal, resembling in certain particulars — the shapes of buildings, the angles of streetlamp light — the place he had spent his life unconsciously memorizing, while at the same time it was nowhere he’d ever seen before. Like in a nightmare of which you say afterward, I was at the farm but it wasn’t the farm.

Unless it was far simpler than that. Like, what if what he was now feeling was an impression of the place itself — what the clearing of a forest and the building of shacks and then houses and a church and the digging of sewers and the packing-in of so many people, him included, had served only to disguise? A blast might come, a firestorm. Everything alive or dead here might be burned up at any moment, and what would be left after that but a place?

And if he were somehow to survive and come back here, he would recognize it, he was sure. The eyes would have no evidence with which to confirm, but there would be no question of confirmation. He would feel in his every cell where he was.

The jeweler was on the bridge, at a remove of several hundred feet from the throng surrounding the parade, eating an elephant ear, wishing to talk to his sister again, examining his heart, when the throng came rushing toward the narrow bridge as though a pipe had burst. The people began to fill the streetcars awaiting them on the boulevard, clamorous to get out, now, for reasons that remained unclear to him. Night was falling. He sucked the confectioner’s sugar from his fingers. He had gone to the bridge to look at the water and to get out of the crowd so that he could turn back and see it as a whole. Now the crowd was coming as though it wanted to get a last look at him up close. He stood in the bottleneck, obstructing the current of bodies. He wanted one last glimpse of the girl in the pinafore, this parting sweetness. He was summoning the concentration of hope he would need, and the concentration of mind, on this specific moment. But he was failing to do this, he was caught in two distinct present moments, as though he were wearing a pair of eyeglasses from which one of the lenses had fallen out.