Cartilage and Skin

by Michael James Rizza

  Wanting to give myself plenty of time to get to the appointment, I left my apartment as soon as I finished dressing. I knew what bus to take, but not how long I would have to wait for it. Bolting the door behind me, I hurried down the corridor, trying to scoot silently past Claudia’s apartment, then out the front door and down the steps, keeping my head down, in case I accidentally saw my landlord. Out of fear of his rodent eyes, I focused my gaze on each square of the sidewalk for an entire block or two. My landlord and I had said all that needed to be said between us. He had offered me a simple, gentlemanly abolishment of my lease agreement. We never had to see each other again. He had even given me back my month and a half security deposit, so nothing would hold me back if an impulse to leave suddenly struck me one night. I didn’t even have to bother saying goodbye. This was his solution to our altercation on the steps, a horrible, ugly scene that had occurred three days prior to the dreadful phone call.

  II

  Oblivious to how long I’d remained splayed and bleeding on the cold sidewalk, the instant I regained consciousness, I sat up and ranted at my landlord in a delirious panic. With my head throbbing, I was vaguely aware of him trying to tell me that an ambulance was on its way, but many of the roads had yet to be cleared of snow. I warned him not to touch me, and I called him a vile rat, among other things, as a few windows and doors began to open, allowing curious bodies to see what all the commotion was about. I wanted someone to come to my rescue because I was convinced that he had attacked me with a shovel and if not for the witnesses, he would have been dealing me a deathblow. But no one was helping me. The sight of blood on my palm and the crushing pain in my head drove me into the feverish pitch of hysterical frenzy. The louder I screamed that I had been struck down by this hateful creature, the louder the little man defended himself, bellowing that I was insane. He said that I’d fallen down the stairs all by myself. I said I would sue him and own the building. Hearing the sound of these words on my own lips, I was seized by a sudden flash of insight; I threatened that as soon as I owned the building and everything in it, I was going to throw him out on the street, so he could scurry back into the sewer with all the other vermin. Nobody watching us seemed to care, so we both shifted our focus, and rather than continue to address our audience, we insulted one another directly. We began to criticize the other’s character and point out all the faults we could imagine. Still sitting on the sidewalk, in the process of getting up but not quite able to complete the act, I sensed that I was winning the verbal battle. There was more wit and flare to my abuse. At some point, I called him a loveless gnome, and this epithet must have pleased me because I began to tag it onto everything I said. When he called me gross, I grinned; he was so unimaginative that he had to use the same word for both my neighbor and me. All the while, people lingered in the windows and doorways. We were yelling at each other even after the ambulance arrived and a black woman with long, cool fingers began touching me. She tolerated us for a moment or two, but then she stood up and reprimanded us as though we were children, pointing her finger primarily at me, saying, “Mother of God. Mother of God,” and whatever else she said I don’t really remember. The rodent fell silent, moved back to the base of the steps, and began to glower. The woman touched me and spoke in a soothing voice. She smelt as though she’d been chewing a sprig of anisette. My delirium started to subside beneath this woman’s gentleness. She didn’t think anything was seriously wrong with me, but to play it safe, I ought to get x-rays, which, in the end, confirmed her initial diagnosis: Nothing was seriously wrong with me.

  When I returned from the hospital a few hours later, I found my landlord waiting for me. He wanted us to come to an understanding. We acted composed and civil as we stood at the threshold of my apartment. I mostly listened and nodded as he presented his case. First of all, he didn’t own a single brick or nail in the entire building. He managed things for a corporation in New Jersey, which was comprised of two Greek brothers who owned a small strip mall; roughly fifty acres of undeveloped land that, after failing a round of perc tests, only generated revenue from a gun club; and this apartment building. If I wanted the building, I’d have to sue the Greeks. Second, my landlord, who apparently wasn’t my landlord after all, had warned me about the bag of salt. It was my fault that I’d tripped. Third, he gave me back my security deposit, so nothing would hinder me from leaving. Apparently, I didn’t need to give him any notice. I could simply vanish, spontaneously combust, or fall victim to any sort of abduction or annihilation. I continued to nod. We stood silently for a moment, inspecting one another, not shaking hands to seal or confirm our potential pact, nor withdrawing to our separate little rooms. We both assumed that the other was waiting for something else to be added to the conversation. I slipped the money into my pocket. Part of me faintly realized that I could now give back some money to Morris the man; another part of me suspected that my landlord wanted my response right there on the spot. I was about to speak, maybe even concede to leaving, but then his face sagged, as if he were reluctantly about to yield, as if he were giving up. With a hint of a grimace and a small show of fidgeting, he informed me that Claudia Jones’s website was possibly called “Choice Bits” or something similar. At the moment, I hadn’t been thinking about the web address at all, yet I could now see what the man thought about me. In his little brain, “Choice Bits” was part of our negotiation; it was the reason I was holding out; it was my selling point, my weak spot. In response, I shrugged, as if I no longer had any interest or that perhaps all along my interest had been a sham. I thanked him for the money and closed myself in my apartment, where I remained undisturbed until the social worker requested my assistance with the boy. At the time, I never suspected how everything—“Choice Bits,” my security deposit, the phone call—could possibly be connected, but I was on my way.

  III

  I arrived at the bus stop and concealed myself inside the glass enclosure. The metal bench was wet and frozen, so I stood back against the side wall and shivered. Remembering the day of the mist when I had sought shelter inside a different bus stop, I looked at the walls to see the posted flyers, imagining that I might find “Iago as Id” or “Female Models Wanted.” Besides the scrawl of graffiti, there was only a solitary sign, something handwritten in Spanish and referring to niños; someone named Marquita was offering her services as a babysitter. I had a strange, fleeting idea that even though I was childless, I could pay by the hour to have Marquita sit on my couch and watch television one night. Before the utter absurdity of this thought could check me, I plucked her phone number and stuck it in my pocket. I shrunk a little inside my coat as I remembered the black man on the motorcycle, Dr. Barnett, for I knew that the particular shape of his masculinity prevented him from ever entertaining the notion of paying for female company, sexual or otherwise. This was as likely as his putting a cowbell around his neck and skipping down Market Street in a thong. He was a man, composed of himself, and I was something else, something shapeless, a myriad of oozing parts.

  After a while, a cold-bitten, watery-eyed woman joined me; she trailed behind her—attached by a purple mitten—a small, plump, excessively bundled creature, possibly a child, a dwarf, or a monkey, for only two black pupils peered out of a slit in a scarf that was wrapped around its fluffy-hooded head. When the bus came, the woman dragged the hobbling creature up the steps. As I started up behind her, I suddenly recalled one other incident during the misty day: Just before I had stepped inside the bus stop, I’d momentarily noticed a motionless figure standing against the building. Now, with some instinct or premonition arresting my stride on the bus steps, and with one hand holding the rail, I leaned out of the door and looked up the street. Everything appeared ordinary. Then I turned my head and searched in the opposite direction. Less than a block away, facing me, was a lone figure dressed in the same dark green baseball cap and corduroy jacket. I was immediately stunned. If not for the hydraulic hiss of the bus and the driver, ready to close the doors, giving th
e handle a brief, halting jerk—I might not have moved at all. But I stumbled up the steps and down the aisle. Once I was safely in my seat and the rumbling vehicle carried me away, my alarm began to settle down. In fact, I became amazingly calm, not because I convinced myself that the person on the street was a mere coincidence, but rather, deep down, I’d been conscious all along that he had been watching me. I’d been expecting it. Ever since the awful episode of the soiled boy, my body had been especially attuned to the threat of surveillance. Now, here it was at last, and perhaps by the clear spark of intuition or by some other sort of instant lucidity, I knew that it was not the watchful eye of the police, but the crazed glare of a slighted pervert.

  The bus dropped me off a couple of blocks away from my destination and about an hour too early, so I had to find somewhere to wait. I started westward, in the direction I needed to go, suspecting that I might come across a place where I could sit down and drink a cup of coffee. The cold weather seemed to jab at the wound just above my temple, and the hat began to feel heavy upon my head, as though with every step a tourniquet tightened. I knew that W. McTeal was miles away, prowling about the vicinity of my home, waiting for my return. Yet I continued to look for him among the people on the sidewalk. Despite my alertness, I was somewhat blind, too preoccupied with W. McTeal and my imminent appointment, let alone with finding a coffee shop. I wasn’t really taking notice of my surroundings. Even so, I started to sense that something unusual was happening in the road; a long row of cars was double-parked; and on the sidewalk, many people were simply standing in small groups, forcing me to walk around them. They seemed mute, hushed, almost secretive. One or two played the emissary, milling about from group to group, passing along some quiet communication. It was an oddly disjointed collection of people, dressed alike in dark, dreary clothes. Just when I began to wonder what these people were up to, they all appeared to respond to a mysterious signal that only they and maybe dogs could hear, for they began to move, to step off the sidewalk, and to get into cars. I stopped walking, as one by one, the engines turned and idled. From the tailpipes, puffs of gray exhaust tumbled onto the pavement and then drifted upward, thinning and fading. After a moment, the cars started forward, one after another, in formation, each shining its headlights on the rear of the car in front of it. I looked toward the head of the line, for the hearse, but the row had already rounded the corner up ahead. Although the somber faces behind the windows didn’t turn and look at me, I sense that I was aligned with their grief and with the general sobriety of conspicuous mortality. I recalled that in older times, back when men wore black bands around their biceps, a person would show his respect for a funeral procession by stopping whatever he was doing, removing his hat, and quietly waiting until the last mourner was out of sight. Such customs must still exist, if not in the military then at least in small religious southern towns, where if not war then at least God served as a constant reminder of our vulgar fragility. When the final car turned the corner, I realized that despite the band cinching tightly around my skull, I’d forgotten to take off my hat.

  The church was beside me, a monument of stonework, filled with stained glass, its spires reaching heavenward but tapering off to a point, possibly with a failing effort, a diminishing of faith, at which the architects of the Tower of Babel would have surely blushed and thought to themselves, Why not go higher? The building itself was set back at the end of a set of long, wide steps, as if the sidewalk, the road, all the other buildings, and thus the whole city block had been planned and erected around it. Lingering at the base of the steps, I looked up at a pair of large wooden doors. I felt a sort of instinctual and sudden revulsion, a physical reaction, as something inside my stomach turned loose and slimy. I took a deep breath and swallowed hard, confused by the abrupt change in me. Maybe the impression that the recent display of mortality had made upon me was now mixing with the aloofness of the ancient building and the frigid austerity of its masonry. Maybe my reaction had something to do with my appointment, the inflamed pervert, or the bits and pieces of my bovine neighbor. My disgust tasted as if it were bubbling up in response to something scatological, yet the church appeared hard and lifeless, unable to elicit the revulsion that I felt. I continued to stare at it. Although I was ordinarily indifferent to Christianity, dismissing it with a haughty wave of my hand, as most academics do, I now had an urge to mock it. I readily found the easy, common, and trite insults. I felt myself confronting the immensity, the absurd size, of the building. The whole towering edifice seemed disproportionate to the value I invested in it. By abstracting God from its history, I imagined that throughout the ages, many sexually troubled young men had looked toward the church; they hoped to discover their calling and thus to alleviate the pulse and anguish of their private lusts, yet these lonely men—who decided to commit themselves to self-denial, who were lured out of the cramped confines of their provincial homes, who were singly drawn from various parts of the land—soon found themselves assembled in a repressed and gaudy brotherhood, within the cold, quiet, stony chambers of the seminaries, amassed in their dormitories, congregated in bathrooms, and paired off secretly in darkened nooks; they were one body, sealed from the outside world for seven years, studying together to take their holy orders, finding release in one another, finding kindred pain, longing, and confusion, and finding sex—seven years of hushed and wicked pleasure—and so the supposedly sterile seminaries were hothouses in disguise, a secret club, which every season enticed new, troubled recruits who were hoping to extinguish their forbidden desire but soon discovered the welcoming arms and yielding bodies of their brothers in the Lord.

  Inexplicably, my stomach was full of slime, and I spat on the steps.

  What did I care about the sin, the sex, or the pretense. Yet I was angry. Although the building loomed above me, it seemed very far away, at an impossible distance, gloating in its own majesty, rather than condescending to the squat, shabby grime of low life—even though its stones, in fact, were less polished than they were weathered and soot-covered.

  I spat again.

  When I started to walk, I looked around, checking to see if anyone had seen my irreverence. I suspected that I wore my vehemence on my face and almost regretted no one was there to witness it. The intensity of my emotions was being wasted. Even so, not too far from the building, I began to feel silly. I was never that absurd fool who shook his fist at God; neither did I shake my fist at slugs or doorstops. The institution of religion, which was simply a manner of people, was a different issue. I couldn’t blame it for not remedying the problems of the world because I knew that the failure of Christian charity—of its feeding of the hungry and of its clothing of the poor—was in direct proportion to my own failure to adhere, as though I’d imagined charity wasn’t so much a product of footwork and sacrifice as it was a poof of smoke and a misty miracle.

  I spat again, this time on a scrappy tree, planted to adorn the street but now choked and horribly displaced.

  A couple was coming my way, the girl leaning against the boy. She was dressed in a heap of gray sweat clothes. He had a sweatband riding low across his forehead, covering his eyebrows; his black hair appeared to have exploded out of the top of his head, as if by a shotgun blast. She hugged his arm, snuggled it between her breasts. Her caramel skin appeared to glow with beauty, simply because she was happy to be on an afternoon stroll with her boyfriend in the bitter cold. Although they were young, and their affection toward one another seemed to contain something pure and innocent, I knew, of course, that they copulated as often as they had the opportunity to be alone, that she longed to take out his penis and adore it, and that she would work him dry in dirty adoration. She would grin filthily at his satisfaction. He would feign indifference, but that was part of his allure.

  As we began to close the space between us, I wanted them to see the indignation on my face. Far away, on a distant street, a small dog began to yelp, faint but incessant. Somewhere in the back of my mind, my spirit was inex
plicably emboldened by the notion of being on a mission: The boy needed me, and I was heading toward some heroic gesture. I felt more important than the young couple on the sidewalk. This feeling was similar to the sense of petty power that I had experienced when I was a gangly college student working as an usher in the local movie theatre. That job had lasted only a few weekends because I had found too much cynical joy in strolling up and down the aisle, then suddenly shining the beam of my flashlight on the faces of some young, cuddly couple, disrupting their warm, romantic mood.

  As they walked, the boy said something to the girl, and she—all lovely and beautiful and devoted—smiled and held onto him, as though she lacked an ego of her own and only he, who was seemingly all grunts and stonework, was her abiding strength.

  For some reason, I wanted to dismantle them, not with profundity or truth, but with disdain. I was leering, full of bile, ready for confrontation. I wished I had my flashlight. Perhaps if there was no ultimate happiness, then there should be no momentary happiness either.

  The boy, however, had his eye on me. He was speaking to her, but looking at me. Before I could say anything, he cut me short.

  “What are you looking at, poppy?”

  And so we passed one another on the street, and only the dim shadow of my intended action fell across the happy couple. In another pace or two, I once again ceased to exist to them; they strolled onward in the aura of their own radiance, in love and impenetrable. As the sound of their footsteps gradually died, I continued to hear the crazy yapping of the dog. Now it sounded closer.

  I consoled myself with the thought of the couple’s insignificance. They were oblivious; they couldn’t have known that not far away, laid out in a hospital bed, a tortured and emaciated boy waited for me. This portrait of the boy was displayed clearly before me, yet most of it was conjured out of my imagination because I’d never actually seen the boy in such a helpless condition, nor had I ever been to the building to which I was now heading. The social worker had given me the address over the phone, and I had surely passed the place numerous times during my tenure in the city, but I had no memory of a clinic being there. Perhaps it was inconspicuous, only a weathered shingle beside a thin door.