Salvatore Scibona: The End

Now the crowd was gone at last. Night had fallen utterly. He walked off the bridge and found at the end of the rail a muddy, switchback ing path through the bull thistle and sumacs, to the water’s edge. A heap of oil filters rusted on the far bank. He took two steps into the current.

What were the worst days? The very worst? The days when he couldn’t read. His eyes wouldn’t stick to the words. At times a week of this. What was the sadness of weeks like these? It was the sadness of Today, in my mind, has been so void and brief, it’s hardly taken place. Yesterday was only a moment ago. Other days, conversely, he lay on the parlor daybed sunup through midnight reading a big leather-bound book with gilt pages, and his sister brought in his food on a tin platter, and tea, and he got up only to empty his bladder and his bowels. On those days he felt free of the elapsing of minutes: like the long-ago preacher in Prestonsburg said of God, “He does not endure for all time; he lives outside of time.” It was such a sweetness those days in the parlor, to occupy a room, a self, made only of words, the objectness of things having been peeled off and tossed aside. He said his mother’s name, waking her from the dead.

If he could denude himself of his mineral self, leaving only his caption, he would become at last transeunt, transient, timeless.

There was a dream from childhood that returned to this day, a dream in which he was thrust from a precipice by an unseen person and fell, wheeling through the air.

The rocks beneath his feet were slick with moss. The body, even now, struggled to preserve the balance to which it was accustomed. He slipped. He fell neck-deep, his arms twisting behind him to stop the fall, to protect the head. He half-stood again, on a rock deeper down, and slipped again and fell.

Now, above him on the bridge, the nothing at which the arrow of fear pointed took shape. He glimpsed it as it became material. He saw it with his material eyes. It was as real as he was. The shape it took was of a very tall, slender male figure running across the bridge. A boy, fleet of foot, passing in the dark over and away from him.

Here is at last our end goal, the child’s dream come to its fulfillment: Having begun again to fall and twist fearfully in the air, we find our will; we aim our face down; we do not say “fall,” but “dive”; we watch the ground rush to meet our eyes. Here it is. We do not make land-fall. We are a line intersecting a plane. We shoot through.

Ciccio stood up from the curb.

The Russians weren’t coming. People lost track of time when they played cards, that was all.

The glut of crumpled paper cups and napkins and sandwich wrappers clogging the grates of the storm sewers was such that when the thunderstorm that was about to crack open above his head finally cracked, the streets would flood, the trash would float down to the creek and sail through the night toward its mouth and settle at last on the floor of the lake. If he stayed right here he would see the last evidence of the crowd carried off on the water. And if a cyclone touched down on this place and lifted the buildings away, and if he chose to stay here and watch. .

Was that the choice? Were those the only choices? Whether to take shelter in the basement of a heavy building or to stay, to stay, to stay, out here and watch and risk being carried off into the air? The storm was coming, the storm was saying, Either stay here and watch me and be carried off, or take cover; either way you have to answer to me. But he didn’t want to. No. He didn’t want to answer it. No, he didn’t. He didn’t.

It wasn’t until he came to a halt on the corner of Eighteenth Street to check for cars coming (there were no cars coming) that he said to himself, I’ve stood up from the curb and I’m carrying myself away and out. He didn’t know this was happening until he described it to himself. Likewise, he didn’t know he was running until he was on the bridge (the wind blasting him backward, only still he was going forward across the bridge, in the direction of the boulevard) and said to himself that he wasn’t sprinting, he was galloping, that was the word, in his dress shoes through the wealth of garbage on the pavement of the bridge.

Two colored women were waiting at the streetcar stop, an older one and a younger one that only looked old, both of them laughing on the bench there. He couldn’t hear what they were laughing about. It was still windier than before. The younger one was rubbing the sole of the unshod foot of the older one, who wore pearls in her ears and whose long hair was braided with a piece of ribbon and coiled around the crown of her head like a wreath.

He counted his change. There was an electric ozone odor of imminent summer rain. The smell of No more work today, time to get inside, there’s a honeydew for after supper. He didn’t want to go in under the awning of the trolley stop with the colored women because he wanted to feel the rain on his head when it came. For a second the wind quit squalling and he heard the older one say, “That’s a coincidence. They don’t call it a corn because it’s like corn. They call it that because it grows out of the bone like a horn does.”

Ozone was the result of electricity shooting through the air, forming oxygen molecules with three atoms instead of two, and young people smelling it were stricken with nostalgia even when they had never left home before.

Then the streetcar came and the colored women got on it, and he did, too.

Later, on the train heading west along the lakeshore, a train that was, as it happened, the last scheduled departure from Erie Station Tower for the night, the conductor asked him for the ticket he hadn’t bought. Ciccio reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. But the ticket wasn’t there! He stood and turned his trouser pockets inside out. He’d forgotten it at home! “Oh, jeez, you’ll kick me off the train!” he said.

The conductor’s rheumy eyes came up to Ciccio’s jutting Adam’s apple, and his mutton-chop whiskers grew into his mustache, so that he looked like Chester Arthur and also like a walrus. He filled his cheeks with air and expelled it pensively, looking at the loosened knot of the tie that Donna Costanza had made Ciccio put on for lunch and that Ciccio would have taken off by now if he’d had a bag to stow it in.

He didn’t even have to use the weepy story about the aunt who was expecting him, who’d be pulling out her hair with worry when he didn’t get off the train in Toledo. The conductor just wagged his head sadly, unspeaking, and continued up the aisle. It was a Christian country. He was a kid, there were no real punishments for the likes of him.

He woke up when the train pulled into Sandusky, then he went back to sleep.

He woke up again when the conductor was passing in the dark of the aisle toward the dim light of the gangway that led to the next car. “Mishawaka,” the conductor called. “Mishawaka, Indiana, approaching. Mishawaka.” The ashtray in the armrest of the window seat was stuck shut with chewing gum. It was deeply dark in the cabin. When the gangway door slammed behind the conductor’s back, Ciccio stood up. He couldn’t see anyone else in the cabin with him. Briefly he thought of himself, of what he might be feeling. But he figured that could only be fear, which had derailed him in the past and would not derail him now. And although he knew it was better to feel than to think, he resolved to think instead.

He thought of salmon, and bugs.

Then he thought of Father Delano, teacher of Christian Doctrine, and a game the priest had made them play in class a few months back, a kind of parlor amusement for Jesuit cocktail parties.