Salvatore Scibona - The End

“So what’s all this about, just curiously? What’s the occasion that today I am asked to come in?”

There was a silence while she probably tried to put together the words of an apology for having believed at first what the newspaper had said about Mimmo. Rocco wanted to say it was a case of no harm, no foul.

“The occasion?” she said, brightening. “Why, it’s your day off, naturally!”

His streak was over. His secondhand suit was forty years old. He wore it carefully so that he could be buried in it.

She refilled the glasses. “You’re in a position to judge, Rocco. Which is better, work or play?”

He had assumed his visit was concluding, but now his glass was full again. His back eased into his chair. A band in the street could be heard amassing. Horns blared. Somebody was banging cymbals. Ciccio started playing a game with them before they knew what he was doing, and before they knew it they were playing along. Rocco recollected from his bottommost depths the pleasure of company, of talking when it didn’t matter what the topic was. Behind how many windows for how many years had others laughed and talked of nothing while he had organized his life to avoid them? He had been wasteful of himself — he had drained himself down the drain.

“Hail,” Ciccio said, “bombs, volcanic ash.”

“What is this?” Mrs. Marini said.

“Birds that have heart attacks.”

“Objects descending from the clouds!” Rocco said.

“Oh, good, a game. My turn now,” she said. “The sun. A pumpkin. A twenty-dollar gold coin.”

“Things that are orange,” Ciccio said.

“You can do better than that, Costanza,” she said, slapping the back of her hand.

“Gather pennies and nickels,” Ciccio said. “Look up from a place of darkness to a tiny circle of light.”

She said, “Things that little underprivileged children do.”

“Wrong,” Ciccio said. “Cry for help. Play with the rope and the bucket.”

Rocco said, “Things to do in a well.”

The opposite of to die is to have a family. Therefore to have no family is to be dead.

Rocco detected a stink of turpentine and excused himself to Mrs. Marini’s lavatory, where, with her cold cream and nailbrush, he scoured his hands. He had awoken this morning convinced that his death was upon him; he’d impressed himself by being unafraid; but had he been unafraid only because, having no family, he was already dead?

No. The name of Loveypants was Luigina. The names of his boys were Bobo, Mimmo, and Jimmy. He had a cousin Benedict still in Omaha.

At home, he kept the door of the medicine cabinet open while he washed his hands so as not to see his image in the mirror, but Mrs. Marini’s mirror was affixed to the wall. He turned his back to it while he abraded his fingers. Then, lest he splatter cold cream on the tile, he knelt and continued his work over the commode. The three of them had carried on the whole of the afternoon, and now it was the supper hour, and the racket outside was beckoning them toward the bedlam of the feast.

He flushed. While turning to face the sink, he regarded a grommet on his right shoe, and then, while rinsing his hands, he watched the chrome flange of the drain. But this did not keep him from seeing his arms and stomach at the edge of his vision in the mirror. What did it matter if his hands weren’t clean? It would be four days at least before he touched anybody else’s food. (Oh, but there was all that bread and the onion pastries that were rising in the walk-in at his store; the whole place would smell like a brewery by the time he got back in town; he’d have to go back and throw them out; labor, treasure, purpose — wasted; gloom.) He touched the bathroom doorknob and then turned it courageously. A firecracker exploded in the alley.

Who was this man he became when he emerged from solitude into the company of other people? The hallway smelled of mothballs and was dark, and he felt his private self recede as he approached the bickering in the kitchen.

Ciccio said, “Fine, but if we’d only focused the whole invasion on Montreal in 1812 the continent would have been ours.”

Rocco wanted to turn around, to turn in. He paused in the hallway, solitude at his back, society ahead, feeling ensnared in this middle place, feeling he’d spent his whole life in this hallway and wishing at least for the next couple of hours to be all in the bathroom or all in the street wholeheartedly. I can’t go into the one place, I can’t go into the other, he said to his heart. A sneeze began to overtake him, and he succumbed to it.

Here it was— bam bam bam —the smoke in the streets, ninety-one degrees on the Fahrenheit scale, a boy in a window throwing an egg down at the masses and then a goldfish and then ice cubes. Every half block a man was bent over a box of coals as the sweat dripped and hissed on the pig flesh on the grill, and a woman at his side with cockeyed brown teeth took the money and rolled from time to time a pop bottle over his face. A Rican-looking kid falling out of a tree. There was the stench of animal flesh on fire and human flesh expelling salt and toxins from its pores. A kid climbing a gutter pipe attached to the façade of the church. Everywhere you looked there were children trying to climb things, maybe hoping to get out by way of up, then falling or sliding down like when an earwig is trapped in a bathtub. Kids climbing the backstop of the ball field behind the convent where the carnival rides were parked, kids on the roof of the new pet store scaling the gigantic birdcage that housed a man-sized fiberglass parakeet. The pavement in places was not visible for the bingo cards, prayer cards, matchbooks, eggshells. The men wore ties, but their hats were off. A woman kissed a heel of bread and tossed it into a puddle.

Speculations, threats, and scoldings littered the air, slurred and shouted.

“If it was the present day,” said a woman, “I already would have left you fifty times and a half.”

“Once we get home, young man,” said a man, “I got a big stick waiting for you.”

Somebody said, “No, just a friend from Oskaloosa Reformatory. Wanted to give him courage, but they wouldn’t let me.”

“The Amish can take buses, but they can’t drive them, that’s all.”

“Everything is in place and nothing is in order.”

“I don’t remember it very clearly, you see,” someone said, “because it didn’t happen.”

A priest pointing with a slow and curving finger at the asphalt insisted, “It doesn’t live here.”

A human skull was immured in a niche bordering the courtyard of the convent, and various other bones — ribs and fingers and clavicles — were mortared around it in a pattern that resembled a chrysanthemum, and beneath it was an inscription in a copper plate reading: Let us perform works of justice and mercy while we are still in time. Someone said, “Now, you shut up and listen to me.” Someone else: “In the part of the brain where the rest of us have common sense they have money.”

Children were climbing sweet-gum trees and telephone poles and ginkgo trees and Papa’s back. Were they trying to climb out? And what were they escaping from, exactly, and where were they escaping to?

A man in a gas mask wearing black shorts and a white tank top and suspenders dragged a love seat onto a third-floor balcony and reclined on it, and observed the crowds, and unbuckled his mask to take a sip on his lemonade.

A couple of police observed on horseback, as still as statuettes on the corners of Sixteenth and of Twenty-eighth. Also, pigeons and rats and alley cats.

Somebody said, “What is that, Stanley? It looks like pie.”