MAN OF SORROWS

 

 

I

 

            He is inside of her, half-immersed.  He pushes deeper and imagines he has filled the darkness.  He starts a rhythm; she syncopates it.  A feather sting gathers out of nowhere.  His wind kicks.  Fluid pulses; ebbs.

            Touch returns.  A breast in his palm; the shed skin of top sheet around his ankles.  He rests his weight on her.  The oscillating hum of a fan fills the space overhead where he has been.  She winds a leg around the harrow of his hip.  Dark smells drift out of them.

 

II

 

            He awakens, finished with the idea of sleep.  He pulls the bedroom curtain back.  The air in the loft is close, closer than gold street light flooding smoked glass windows.

            Outside on the fire escape, ranks of new air stir.  Iron slats groove his feet with the pain of gravity and a breeze cools his sweat.  Two beams of light from the Insurance Tower bridge the darkness over the skyline, while red lights blink on a hospital roof.

            I am a man of sorrows, he says.  It does not sound true.  A hand touches his shoulder and Mara says, come inside, Dane, you’re naked.

 

III

 

            Dane slips out the next night, wearing only blue jeans—no shoes to sound the hall, bare-chested to feel the air.  He walks the stairwell, where shuffles amplify and doors boom, touching the rail on his descent.  The parti-colored outline of a naked body soars, arms outstretched, up the wall between each landing, like a logo for the spirit of flight.

            On the street, a pattern of gold lights veers north, and in the downtown neon hums under clean post-moderns.  Dane steps onto the avenue.  A dark shining car slices the corner and roars past him.  He is not hit, but the near miss jolts his chest like a rupture.  He is spared by a clock’s tick, chance, helpless and ashamed as a lone man risen from the dead in a cemetery.

            A dog barks.  Somewhere between brick rows a bass beat drums.  He faces tenements.  Street talk jabbers like a foreign language in his head.  I must pass here once, or I will never be free of the shining car, my good fortune and shame.

 

IV

 

            The project is dark except for two second-floor windows.  A woman sags in the frame of one, silhouetted, breasts hung low, resenting the light that exposes her.  She watches me.  The glow of white skin in the darkness.

            Dane does not see the men there addicted to the stoop until he is beside them.  One man leans, a hand visiting his genitals like a night watch, the other hunches, speaking words beyond his understanding.  They stare through him.

            Look at me.  I will walk under your shadow, only do not touch me.  They let him pass unharmed.

 

V

 

            Dane is at the gate when a dog rambles out of the shadow of the factory, snarl ragged.  He tells himself this must come to pass, yet he runs, bare feet slapping blacktop.  A stone pierces his heel.  He pulls up halt, hears the animal gain by huff and stride, and he leaps for the hood of a delivery truck.  Pit Bull splatters steel.  Dane clambers to the roof.

            He pries the stone out, rocks with the pain.  For the first time I am in danger; I have always been in danger.  He shucks off his jeans and dangles pant legs at snapping jaws. Teeth clamp.  He pulls and the dog lifts; he rocks and the dog caroms.  The arc swings wide.  He lets go and the dog sails away with blue jeans.  Dane leaps.  Pain rifles through marrow.  He hobbles to the factory door and closes out a growl.

            Dane stands pressed to the door, chest heaving.  I have escaped with the ease of a lie, a bruise on my heel.

 

VI

 

            Night comes again.  He walks an angry neighborhood.  Curses muffle behind yellow windows like a cough behind a fist.  Streetlights flutter blue.  A wad of spit slaps the pavement near his feet.  It is not enough.  A man may dress against insults, but he is naked against violence.  Dane stops.  You spit at me, he says to the spitter.  No, says the man, you’s walkin’ where I spit.  Another man, built like smooth hard rubble, stands beside him.

            There is no way to prophesy pain, except for the readiness of fists.  He dreads rough hands, but he craves their justice.  Dane spits back at the spitter’s shoe.  The one built like rubble jacks him up by the arm pits.  It starts.  He shuts his eyes.  He is intent on the pain, not on his attackers, not on escape.  The blows shock him.  He feels their rhythm and a counter-rhythm of nausea, weightlessness.  His head snaps back; lightning shines behind his eyelids and his jaw explodes.  Something hard and ragged rolls like a pebble over his tongue.  He tastes blood, heaves, vomits on the ground.  They drop him and he folds into his own sour bile.

            The shadows of men retreat.  Curses fade like promises of love after passion, and he imagines he has borne the last beating.  I am a man of sorrows.  There is nothing to fear in this place; nothing worse.

 

VII

 

            An hour has passed since Mara reached and the bed stretched out like silence, since she searched for Dane on the fire escape.  She feels the capacity of high ceilings to reverberate her fear.  She reasons it out again:  he couldn’t sleep; he needed something at an all-night store and didn’t want to wake me; he’ll be back any moment.  Unless…

            It comes eventually.  All this time I have been fortunate, deceived.  She rocks through the silence.  She calls hospitals, police.  Dane is nowhere. Thinking with his mind she follows him down the avenue, but cannot find an easy complication to delay him.

            Mara startles at the sound of scraping from the hallway.  Dane?  She flings the door wide.  A bloody man drags himself along the concrete.  Dane.  She knows his form.  There is too much blood and swelling to recognize his face.

            She dabs his puffy eyelids, begs him not to go walking in the night again.  He nods.  I am a man of sorrows.

 

 

VIII

 

            Dane pushes in.  Her anus fits like gloves a size too small.  Somehow he is erect in her, this garish woman.

What makes me immune to her seduction? he wondered, when he passed her on the street.  By what right do I refuse her commerce?

            Venetian blinds shadows slash on street lit walls, slant and twist around the room as cars pass.  Humid sheets and perfume cloys.  Maisy too flashy for your baby blues?  She smiles, gray teeth straining sour breath.  Come on now; you ain’t got to love me; just lay me and pay me.  She undresses and offers her deep brown body.  Bet a good boy like you never done this before.  He has not done this before.

            Dane rises high above her, his own body, as he comes.

            You been to Maisy’s black hole, now she’s gonna take you somewhere else.  From a cheap, sparkling purse she withdraws a syringe.  Not that, he says.  My magic rocks, her eyes go crazy-large. Don’t worry, Baby.  She heats up the rocks.  His arm is knotted off.  He makes a fist.  Needle moles under skin.  Just a little for you, Dane Baby.  That’ll get you off the ground.  She shoots full.

            But why you got to do this?  Maisy asks him while they’re floating high on light beam traffic.  To drain the cup, he says.  Dane Baby, you’re in my heaven.  A motel room, magic rocks and a gentle man like you.  Sufferin’?  That’s daylight, somewhere in your heaven. You understand how that works, sweet man?  She laughs.  What cup I got to drain to get me there?

IX

 

            Mara rages.  Something like a growl accompanies her blows.  He does not resist her welcome, not even the damaging knee that brings him down.  It is morning and Dane is wasted.  A mop handle strikes his ribs and vertebrae.  He looks up and says, my father never beat me, with wonder in his voice.  Mara quits, drops the handle.  Short of killing him, she cannot stop it.  Why? she asks, her whole face trembling at the word.

 

X

 

            It is not enough.  He rumbles down the stairwell another night, past the colorful flying logo.  He knows that fear is human; it is nothing without a man.  How do you prepare to face a nothing, until it stands before you, named?  I won’t wait for you, he shouts into factory night, like a child who is always ‘it’ counting 48, 49, 100.  Here I come.  Yet, he cannot imagine what is waiting.  I am lulled by peace and safety.  Clean lies.

            He chooses no neighborhood, but three men smoking in the park.  They watch him approach, white as dreams, barefoot, slim.

            I know I am a stranger, he says, but if you will make me your enemy—

            They cock their heads; the man in the middle laughs.

            Dane says, Please, if you have it in you, do the worst to me; the worst you can imagine.

            That’s messed up, the middle man laughs like a loaded spring.  Shut up, J, the first man says.  He throws his cigarette down and licks his lower lip.  You want us to hurt you?

            Dane nods.

            So what do we do?

            I can’t say, but there is no limit.  I can’t even tell you if I should live.

            J spooks.  Count me out of this, he says, hands up.  The third man watches, slit-eyed.  Here? the first man asks.

            No, someplace safe.

            Safe, the third man echoes.

            Three days, Dane says.

            The first man exhales deeply and licks his lips.

 

XI

 

            Mara hopes, not for Dane’s return, only for what the night and the city give back to her, something on this morning of the third day.  She leaves the door unlocked for him and goes to bed.  This time she cannot answer.

            She is awake when he comes in.  A syncopated, slow limp homeward.  Then no sound.  She goes out, numb and dutiful, finds him clinging to the wall.  He does not look at her.  She says nothing.  His torso is dark with grime and bruises and dried blood smeared like primer.  His back is striped.  He shakes from the effort of standing.

            In the bathroom, she fills the tub.  She takes his arm and sound drones out of his open mouth.  He smells of urine.  His hair is greasy, tarnished.

            She cuts his jeans away with scissors.  His legs and buttocks are pocked with burn scars; his genitalia razor slit.  She stands him in the tub.  His eyes bulge and his upper body muscles twitch.  He is lean as a starved dog.  She sponges him quickly to keep the healing scars from softening.  His face lights with pain as she sweeps his crack, and out of his mouth come words that sound to her like, we are healed.

 

XII

 

            He walks.  Under a gold light pattern on the avenue.  Void of days.  Unfathomed night passing over him again with elements and viral strains, or the next slaughter involving guns, plutonium and reasons.

            The human logo, arms outstretched over night, soars across a billboard, flight willed from the beginning to the walls of caves, stairwells.  Not to human hands and feet.  I am a man of sorrows, Dane repeats the ancient prophecy.  What must I do to be saved?

 

The End