Salvatore Scibona - The End

“Write in ink on a scrap of paper,” the bumptious, shrunken, emphatic, salt white priest had said, “the deadly sin to which your character is most likely to fall prey. Don’t think. Just fess up. Nobody else will see this. It’s for your own reference.” Ciccio wrote wrath and gluttony. Then he struck out gluttony. He was still growing, after all. Father Delano said, “What you have written down so quickly is ipso facto a sin you can acknowledge with ease. You are reconciled to this sin. You are clandestinely prideful of it. The ego generated this response. The function of the ego is to what? To protect the self from the world of others. Now then, being boys and being sixteen years of age, you certainly answered ‘lust’ or ‘wrath,’ all of you. I am quite assured. You even believe in the sinfulness of your sin, that it is not in fact soi-disant okay to act lustfully or wrathfully, but this is also charming. That you believe it is a sin is the source of its charm for you.

“Therefore. There is another sin, which isn’t charming. A real sin. No, it is not charming at all. Write down the real sin. I give you twenty seconds this time. No one will know.” When he spoke, he exposed his piebald incisors and flexed his nostrils in spasms and allowed his saliva to collect in a froth at the edges of his lips. He was Swiss, but you could never hear the accent. He had advanced tuberculosis. It was his last year at the school. They’d all heard the news that the order was planning to send him in the fall to a sanitarium in Oklahoma. But he was to die in June in his bed in the rectory, in Ohio.

Ciccio had dipped his pen. Vanity, he wrote in a burst. Then he looked at the word. He couldn’t remember if it was one of the seven on its own or if it was a species of pride. No, it was a species of pride, the species concerned not with the insensible but with the sensible portion of the self. And it didn’t fit him right.

“I want you to consider the darkness in your hearts, boys, how deeply dark it is in there. Surely what you’ve just written down still fails to puncture the shell of your viciousness. If it was so easy of access and if you truly believed in the sinfulness of it, you would have fixed it already. This second sin is a mask for the sin about which you cannot come clean. The ego protects the self from assaults from without but also from within, namely, in this case, from knowledge of your real sin. Your real sin, which is what?”

It was too dark in the cabin. The light from the gangway made it feel only darker. If he had any money at all he would have traded it away only to fall back asleep.

Wrath, he had written again, and had drawn a line underneath and circled it.

“Your sense of culpability continues unabated,” the priest said, “notwithstanding that you may have meditated for many years on your sins and confessed them sincerely. Sin is layered on sin. Each layer gives the lie to a more fundamental and abstract layer. There is an eidos of sin, of which all these others are representations. You feel you are on the hook for something you wish you could express and cannot.”

The thing to do was to keep out of his mind the desire to sleep, to eat something. To think of desires would soon lead to feeling them.

“The myths of Adam and Eve’s disobedience and of original sin itself aren’t postulates you must take on faith, from which postulates you derive your morality. They are allegories for something we cannot precisely articulate because we cannot precisely see it because it is so close to us.

“In fact, we have empirical evidence that we are broken. Behold, the psalm says, I was shapen in wickedness. Behold, as in, Look, look at it, you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it, you see it for yourself, if darkly. The story is a post festum story that we invent in order to describe mythically the supernatural source of the experience. We know in the darkness of our hearts that it is not any sinful act that condemns us but the form of sin — which is coextensive with the form of the human being — that condemns us. In our dreams we experience the infiniteness of the emptiness that awaits us, and we know it to be irrevocable. We cannot be free of the emptiness that is our fate and continue to be what we are.

“And yet our Lord promises us redemption.”

And yet right now, in the cabin, Ciccio could hear his feelings, as if from a distant source; they were the ringing in the ears after a great explosion.

The priest had wiped the spittle from his mouth with his handkerchief. He said, “It would appear therefore that when we are redeemed, we shall cease to be ourselves.”

Ciccio was fearful from knowing that he was hungry and knowing that he didn’t know how he was going to eat again.

All his far-flung mental roads led back to a central question, and he didn’t know if it was the right question, the real question, or only a question that he was tricked into asking by the flawed lens through which he had to look at things. And the question was this: In order to do what I am built for doing, must I dispose of myself?

He thought again of salmon, and of the males of so many insect species who mated, if they were lucky, only to have their heads bitten off in the heat of the act, or mated in midair and fell dead to the ground. That was the baker Rocco, whose heirs Ciccio had never met in fifteen years of passing him every day on the street. The baker was a he-wasp, built to fertilize the queen and die: The swarm he fathered would never know him or care to know him. A world would open up, but only after the founder was dispatched.

Ciccio cast his eyes about the cabin, trying to find something to take in, something physical to notice, and perceived only that it was dark and that he was alone. This was a momentous moment, the final escape — which years from now he would think of as the first escape — and he wanted something to remember it by, a perversity, like the baker’s perfumed leather oil. That Ciccio could see only what was not there, no light, nobody to talk to, meant that years from now he would remember this only as a script of thinking, like the amnesia days on the farm. A wife, maybe, whose face as yet remained insensible, would ask him to tell her what it looked like inside the train when he woke up in Mishawaka, Indiana, the first time he left his home state, at night in the train that would at length lead him to her, and he wouldn’t remember anything about it. He would remember only the colorless face of the dying priest who had told him months earlier that his best hope was to disappear.

Then there were stops in South Bend, and in Michigan City, and in Gary, as the morning light began to hone the edges of the shapes outside the window. He harbored within himself, despite himself, the shamefullest emotions about the country as he watched it moving by him, his home country, to which he belonged regardless of his desire to belong to it. He loved shamefully the names of the states as children love their mothers. He loved the shapes of the states. Oklahoma, he said in his mind, two long o s, two short a s, and wanted to know if there would be anyone to whom he could disclose, ever, the tenderness of his feelings, in all their callowness, when he said this word. There was something he wanted to say out loud. There was a word he wanted to listen to. There was a used-car lot flying past him with a hundred plastic yellow pennants flapping, and the prices were painted on the windshields of the cars.

The conductor — it was a different conductor now, but he wore the same monkey cap with the lacquered black visor — teetered by, steadying himself on the headrests of the vacant seats down the aisle of the cabin, calling, “Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, approaching. Union Station. Chicago.”