We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone

by Ronald Malfi

  He’s drinking beer with my father Saturday afternoon in our kitchen and my father introduces us.

  “Good to meet you, Gideon,” Carter Johnson says, rising and shaking my hand. It is like shaking a chainsaw. “Lookin’ forward to havin’ you come aboard Monday.”

  “I appreciate it,” I say, and move down the hallway.

  My mother is in her bedroom, propped up on the bed and staring blankly at the wall. It is the way my father sat that night while holding his gun. I enter the room quietly and pause at the foot of the bed, staring at my mother’s profile. She doesn’t turn to acknowledge me.

  I say, “It’s a nice day out, Ma. You should go out, get some sun.”

  She is slowly gnawing at her lower lip. I notice she isn’t staring at the wall but peering out the window and down at the street below. She is watching a group of young black girls play hopscotch. My mother, she watches these girls like someone lost in a dream.

  From the kitchen, I hear the dull boom of laughter.

  “Ma…”

  Without looking at me, she says, “You should eat something, Gideon. You look too thin. That’s not a healthy thing for a boy your age.”

  “I been eating,” I say. “I’m okay.” I ask if her head hurts.

  “No,” she says.

  But I can tell it does.

  I spend the rest of the day hanging around Glad Street, but see nothing. People move by and it’s like I’m invisible. Baltimore is good for that. I look homeless in my grimy sweatshirt and torn jeans, leaning against the PNC Bank with my head down and my hair in my face. I finish my final cigarette for the day and toss it in the street when I hear someone shout my name. I look up and see a girl rushing towards me from across the street, black hair streaming behind her, her right hand grappling with a shoulder bag that is slipping down her arm.

  “It is you,” she says, beaming, and hugs me awkwardly with one arm. “I thought I was seeing things.”

  The girl’s name is Alicia Vance and we dated on and off prior to my arrest. She is thin, too thin, and her skin is so white you’d think if you held her up to a light you’d see her heart pumping through the wall of her chest.

  She loops a bony arm around my neck. “When did you get back?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “I’ve missed you.” This is a lie. We were not really on speaking terms the night I was arrested. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “You should come by the loft sometime, see the guys. My God, Gideon, I feel like I haven’t seen you in years.”

  “You still hang at the loft?”

  “Sure. Come by whenever, we’ll throw you a fucking party. It’ll be like the old days. That’s cool, isn’t it? The old days, I mean. They didn’t fuck with your mind too much in that place, did they? Crownsville, right? I hear it’s real shitty, what they do to people there.”

  “It’s cool,” I say. “Wasn’t too bad.” I am looking past her and down Glad Street, only half-listening. She notices and mutters something. “What?” I say.

  “I said, how ’bout a goddamn kiss?”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s the matter? They slip Soft Peter into your food or something?”

  “I don’t get it,” I say.

  “Never mind,” she says. “Just kiss me.”

  * * *

  Carter Johnson is excited about doing something important—in this case, contributing to the rehabilitation of a young urban drug abuser—so he personally shows up Monday morning to drive me to the construction site.

  I sit in the passenger seat of his pickup in silence, watching the decrepit, ancient buildings of the city wash by the window in a blur. Carter Johnson, he is talking to me about nothing important, and I only pretend to fully listen.

  “So you know,” Carter Johnson says, “we give mandatory drug tests once a month.”

  This is bullshit but I don’t say that. He’s trying to play it simple, maybe save face, and I’ll let him do it. I tell him that’s fine, I have no problem with it.

  “I mean, it’s nothin’ against you,” he goes on anyway. “Just want you to understand that.” Now he sounds like my father and it is suddenly very easy to comprehend their friendship. “All the guys—they all have to do it. It’s a city regulation, Gideon.”

  “Sure,” I say. Whatever.

  Carter Johnson’s men are erecting some office building on the outskirts of the city. The men, they all look like the construction worker cliché—burly, unshaven, flat faces with acne-pocked skin—but they are not. They work efficiently and mostly in silence. They take brief lunches and—surprisingly—are meticulous about washing their hands. A few attempt to engage me in friendly conversation, but something about my demeanor must blaze like an unwelcome torch, and they quickly relent.

  I pay little attention to the work itself. Only when I taste grit and dirt do I remember I am sawing wood, am nailing nails, am carrying shit from trucks and whatever else.

  Lunch, I slip away and find myself wandering closer to downtown. There are a number of people out at this hour—people in suits and people in cutoffs and other various people—and for the most part no one notices me. Hands in my pockets, my head down, I listen to my own respiration as I wander through the city.

  And stop once I reach Glad Street.

  There are people here, too. I recognize many of the buildings, have been inside many of them myself at one time (and not too long ago, either), but I hardly look at them now. I am more interested in the street itself. Glad Street. And the children. BELIEVE. The goddamn signs are everywhere now. It’s like a plague. There are a number of residential tenements along Glad Street and there are a number of children playing in the street. It is a very different scene from the night before. I recall my mother sitting on her bed, half-gazing out the window at children playing hopscotch. I suddenly feel very angry. The BELIEVE signs—there’s one so close to me, taped to the outside of a tenement door. I peel it off, getting my fingernails behind the placard, and hold it for a while at arm’s length. Someone has punched two holes in the placard, each hole occupying the two enclosed bubbles of the B. I turn the placard on its side and hold it up to my face and wear it like a Halloween mask, peer through the holes at the children in the street. They are shouting and tossing a ball back and forth. They laugh and there is the click-click sound of a jump rope whipping the sidewalk.

  BELIEVE. How can posters help if you don’t know what they mean? And who wants to be preached at, anyway?

  Looking through the B, I think I see an angel, a ghost.

  I drop the placard and stare across the street, but there are only kids. No angel. No ghost.

  And I am late returning to work.

  * * *

  The loft is really a basement. I don’t know who named it or who actually owns it, but throughout high school it served as a private refuge where guys came to smoke dope and feel up their girlfriends. It is a large room, windowless and dark, lit only by the flickering illumination of a dozen or so candles. The floor is concrete, covered in places by mismatched rolls of carpet and fire-scarred furniture scavenged from various dumps. The walls are cinder-block and crowded with graffiti. Once, the loft had reeked strongly of mildew and animal feces. Now, only the acrid stink of marijuana exists.

  Tonight Alicia is here, as are two other guys I don’t recognize. I push through the loft’s wooden double-doors and the two guys lethargically lift their heads from an arrangement of pillows on the floor, glance in my direction, then continue circulating a pipe. Alicia rises from a filthy-looking sofa and hugs me as I enter.

  “You’re soaking wet,” she says, rubbing a hand through my hair. “Why did you walk in the rain?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. I don’t tell her that it wasn’t raining when I left my building. I don’t tell her that I hung around Glad Street for an hour before coming here, and that’s when the rain had started. Anyway, Alicia wouldn’t understand.

  “Who is it?” one of
the stoners shout.

  Alicia takes me by the hand and introduces me to the two goons sprawled out like pharaohs on their pile of pillows. I immediately forget their names.

  “You’re the guy that got busted,” mutters one of the pharaohs. “I heard about you. Some guy told me you got ass-raped in rehab.”

  “Someone told you that?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “That true?”

  I shrug off my wet coat and fold it over the back of the filthy sofa. I say, “That’s news to me.”

  “Yeah,” the other guy says, “sure. I mean, that’s what I figured.” And he extends his little glass pipe. The inside of his arm is purple-black and covered in needle tracks. “Want a hit?”

  “No,” I say, shivering. I’m too cold and wet to think about smoking. Anyway, I’m still thinking of Glad Street.

  “Come on,” Alicia says, still holding my hand, and leads me down a narrow corridor that communicates with a basement-level apartment. Someone has spray-painted MIKE THE HEADLESS CHICKEN FOR PRESIDENT on the apartment door.

  “Whose place is this?” I ask.

  Alicia turns the knob and pushes the door open. “Mine,” she says.

  It is a small, one-bedroom job with worn carpeting and a toilet that runs continuous. It reeks of pot in here, too.

  “Place is cool. You live by yourself?”

  “Yeah,” she says, but already I can see some guy’s sneakers in the bathroom doorway, a couple pairs of unwashed boxer shorts lingering about the place. Beneath the pot smell is the undeniable smell of male. Yet I say nothing.

  She takes me to her bedroom. It is as big as a closet, hardly large enough for the tiny bed that takes up most of the room, and the floorboards groan as if in pain when I walk across them. There is a window above the bed’s headboard, facing Glad Street. I feel a chill rush through me—and then Alicia is there, peeling off my shirt.

  “What?” I mutter.

  “You’re such an idiot,” she whispers, and kisses my belly. I stare at the top of her head—at the pale white part down the middle of her hair—in the moonlight coming in from the window. “Come over to the bed.”

  I go to the bed. Alicia removes her shirt and stands in the semi-darkness half-naked. Her breasts are familiar to me. They are small and pale. Alicia’s nipples won’t appear until they’re prodded and squeezed—and then they jut out like knots in bark.

  She gathers me in her arms and pulls me toward the bed, down on top of her. We kiss and she tastes bad, like tonguing the bottom of an ashtray. I have difficulty getting aroused, mainly because I’m listening to the occasional car glide through the rain-swept street outside. Alicia works her way to the button on my jeans, tugs at the waistband, unzips the fly. She moans something but I’m not paying much attention. I feel her cold, thin-fingered hand slide into my pants and grip me forcefully. I am half-propped above her now, and I crane my neck to see out the window. But it’s too dark and I’m positioned poorly, so I see nothing.

  “What?” she says, irritated for the first time. “What? What is it, Gideon? You have to take a leak or something?”

  “Yeah, I do,” I say, which is not completely untrue.

  “Get up, get up,” she tells me, pushing against my bare chest with her hands. “Go use the goddamn bathroom, for God’s sake.”

  I pull myself off her and stagger in the darkness beside the bed, my eyes still trained on the window. On the bed, Alicia scoots back against the headboard and props a pillow over her bare chest. As I move out of the room and into the darkened hallway I can hear her exhale with deliberate exaggeration. I do not turn and look in her direction, though that is what she wants. Instead, I continue to the bathroom, click on the bathroom light—wincing—and close the door behind me. Standing shirtless before the mirror, I look like some peeled fruit. Sickly, the way my mother looks.

  There is a small window between the shower stall and the toilet. I go to it and lift the moldy shade, peer out. There is a BELIEVE poster covering the glass. I feel around the sill for the latch, find it, unlock it. Sliding the window open, I push the poster away from the glass; the driving rain quickly drags it to the sidewalk.

  This is a basement apartment; the window is at ground level and striped with wrought-iron bars. I see the lamppost on the corner of Glad Street. The rest of the street is dark and motionless, yet I cannot pull myself away from the view. My eyes run the length of the street, pausing longest in the darkened, shadowy alleyways between tenements. I think I see something, even through the rain, even through the runnels of water running down the pane of glass, but it is too dark to be sure. I consider opening the window farther—it is one of those windows that push up and out—when I hear the door creak open behind me. I’d forgotten to lock it.

  “Gideon…”

  I turn after some hesitation. Alicia Vance stands shirtless in the doorway, her thin arms propped over her breasts, her thin-fingered hands tucked beneath her armpits.

  “Gideon, what the hell are you doing? You’ve been in here for twenty minutes.”

  I go to say something, but suddenly realize there is something in my mouth. I cannot form words.

  “Jesus Christ, Gideon, you’re bleeding,” Alicia says, refusing to move from the doorway. “You’re still doing that?”

  I catch my reflection in the bathroom mirror and see the heel of my left hand pressed firmly in my mouth. A single teardrop of blood trickles down my wrist toward the bend in my elbow. I am suddenly aware of my teeth biting through the skin. There is no pain.

  “Maybe,” half-naked Alicia Vance says with little emotion, “you should just leave.”

  A few minutes later and I’m back out in the rain. Hugging my sopping coat against my body, shivering, I stand outside Alicia Vance’s apartment building for some time, unmoving, as a car passes slowly down Glad Street. I watch it turn at the intersection, its taillights glittering in the rain, before crossing the street.

  And I catch movement off to my left.

  I spin around, hair plastered to my forehead, rainwater coursing down my face, and catch the fleeting image of a small angel disappearing down one of the darkened alleyways. I see this and immediately cannot move. She is not a real angel—I know this—but, rather, she is a little girl dressed in a white satin gown with crepe paper wings and a pipe-cleaner halo above her head. It is fake; it is an illusion. I know this, too. She is just a little girl in costume.

  Somehow, I am again able to move. I begin running in the direction of the angel, my Nikes crashing through puddles, my hair whipping my face, my heart slamming in my throat. Ahead, the angel has already vanished in the darkness and I can see nothing of her now. She is too fast. I have been waiting for her, expecting her since my return from rehab, but she continues to elude me.

  I tear down the alley and crash into a wedge of metal trash cans. The sound is tremendous, rebounding off the brick alley walls. I spill to the ground, soaked, freezing…and think I almost hear laughter echoing from the other end of the alley. There is a street light at the other end—uninspired orange sodium—and its light falls across the mouth of the alley, but I cannot see the angel beneath the light. I hear her but cannot see her anywhere.

  Catching my breath, my entire body suddenly sore and uncertain, I manage to pull myself to my feet and stagger back out onto Glad Street.

  * * *

  I am not sure where day stops and night begins. Things seem to be in a haze. In four days, the apartment has grown smaller and smaller. The air, it’s like breathing motor oil. If I open a window my father comes around behind me and closes it. If I make too much noise in the kitchen my father stands with his arms folded in the small hallway and stares at me. I say nothing and try to do even less.

  Carter Johnson calls the house on Friday and I answer the telephone. He asks me what’s wrong and I tell him I’m sick and I’m sorry I didn’t call this morning. He asks if I’ll be in later and I tell him probably not.

  “Is this about the drug tests, Gideon? You have to
understand—”

  I hang up.

  My mother doesn’t leave her bedroom. She sits there on the edge of the bed, mimicking the way my father sat that night with his handgun, and she stares silently out her bedroom window. Children play in the street. I, too, watch the children on occasion, but it just makes me angry. This whole city makes me angry. There is nothing to BELIEVE in this city, so who are they kidding? And these kids—there’s no future here. So it just makes me angry, and although I’d lied to Carter Johnson about being sick, by Friday evening I am aware of a slight temperature working its way through my system. The result of moping around in the rain, no doubt.

  Friday night, I move silently through the apartment toward the front door. I hear floorboards creak somewhere ahead of me and I freeze, imagining my father standing somewhere in the darkness. Down the hall I see shapes move.

  “Dad,” I whisper.

  “Gideon.” It is my mother. She steps into the living room, wrapped in a cloth robe, and her skin looks blue and translucent in the gloom. “Did you miss the bus?”

  “What?”

  “Will you be late for school?”

  “I’m not going to school, Ma,” I say. “I haven’t been to school in a long time.”

  “I can pack you a lunch,” she says. Her eyes are black and like two pits in the center of her head. Looking at her, I’m more conscious of my fever. “You don’t eat properly.”

  “I’m going out,” I say, and slip out the door. Hurrying down the stairs and out onto the street, I imagine my mother in the kitchen preparing me a bagged lunch to take to a school I no longer attend.

  I make it to Glad Street in time to see the angel skipping down the sidewalk in the dark. I shout and feel something rupture deep in my throat. I pursue the little girl, my hands stuffed deep into the pockets of my jacket, my teeth rattling in my head. My body feels frozen and numb on the outside, aflame on the inside. I follow the angel toward the intersection of Glad and Charles. She pauses here and begins to spin with her arms straight out. The street is silent and dark and I can hear the scuff of her sneakers on the pavement. I shout again—I am shouting her name, although my brain hardly registers this at the moment—and I look around to see some tenement windows light up.