The Awful Possibilities

by Christian TeBordo

  “I am come in fulfillment of ancient prophecy,” I said, “for though I have no need of riding chaps and my head is uncrowned, is not the celebrity the new American royalty, and am I not, in all modesty, a celebrity?”

  As I finished my introduction he seemed to notice me, as me, for the first time, and I saw in his inebriate and bloodshot eyes, a look of recognition. He breathed a sigh of relief and let his improvised weapon fall to the carpet, relieving me, not of the fear of injury but of having to injure.

  “I thought you were a cowboy,” he said.

  It was only when he said that, that I realized how true the vagrant’s words had been. I’d been thinking of my separation from the tanner in terms of years, whereas the vagrant, in his ignorant intuition, had hit upon the greater changes that the years had wrought. My friend, who, in a sense, I’d left behind even before I’d actually left him behind, had stayed behind to make his way in a much slower universe.

  I tried to explain: “Years ago, I did consider the IT professional to be the new cowboy, and cyberspace the final frontier, but, though I still enjoy hoeing down and consider myself something of a proverbial outlaw, for some time now I have supported myself and my family through speaking engagements and television appearances.”

  The tanner struggled back toward the doorway, indicating it with the hand that had held the bottleneck. “Well, it was an honor getting reacquainted with your highness, but I’m exhausted and drunk and need my rest,” he said.

  I didn’t move from my seat, not wanting to give the impression that I agreed completely with the vagrant. Yes, things had changed, and yes I had moved on to better things and places, but I didn’t want the tanner to think for a moment that I had merely stopped in to lord it over him.

  “Please,” I said, “don’t stand on formality. Pretend that we last saw each other only yesterday, because I assure you, the warmth of my feeling for you has only grown as it would have if we’d remained in contact all this time.”

  My friend didn’t move either, but said: “As happy as it makes me to hear that, I do have to open the shop in a few hours.”

  As certain I was that he was as happy by my attentions as he suggested, his tone contained a certain amount of what I took to be resentment, particularly toward the end of his response, the part about opening his shop, and I realized that he was making a certain assumption, common enough among people of his station, but mistaken nonetheless, about the relative difficulty of our lives and livelihoods. This assumption, that I am successful because I work less, is both absurd and hurtful, and my anger, when faced with it, has been known to get the best of me, but, in this case, my tender feelings toward my friend won out without much struggle and I brushed it off, though I still didn’t move.

  “But friend,” I said, “my visit is not just about pleasure but business too, a matter of business lucrative enough that you could choose not to open the shop tomorrow or the next day or the next week, and still have more money than you would if I left right now.”

  Perhaps it was crude of me to speak so blatantly about matters financial with someone of his meager means, but it seemed to get his attention and his response was no less crude. He let the hand indicating the door drop to his side and said, skeptically: “Oh yeah?”

  I decided that this was the right time to get down to business, so I stood up and made my way over to his work table. He watched me with a combination of friendly curiosity—I was always a bit unpredictable—and an artisan’s awareness, but when I placed my hands upon the oilcloth to remove it with a ceremonial flourish, he ran to the table and placed himself between myself and it.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he said.

  “I respect the sanctity of your studio,” I said, “and will follow your wishes in the way that I treat it, but the workshop will have to be unveiled if our business is to be transacted.”

  He didn’t move, but he said: “What business are you talking about, exactly.”

  “I’ve come for a wallet,” I said, “of the finest hide and craftsmanship, and a pretty handbag to match.”

  The tanner smiled inscrutably and said: “You’ve come to the wrong place.”

  I stepped backward from the table, wondering just what he meant by that, worried that his circumstances had caused him to abandon his dream, angry at the way the neighborhood, the world, crushes that hope out of people, of us. And I don’t just mean him. Do you think I dreamed, when watching him work his magic on that wallet back in YMCA camp, of finding fame and my wife through Which Rich Cowboy Wants to Marry a Frigid Virgin™?

  “Please,” I said to him, “please tell me you haven’t given up.”

  He laughed again and nodded affirmative, a nod so careless, so flippant as to stir in me anger, despite our past closeness and my hopes for our reunion. I clenched my fists and bit my tongue to avoid another outburst. I turned my back to him and began counting to ten, allowing my eyes to wander the room in an attempt to distract myself from my disappointment, but instead my disappointment was exacerbated when I glanced again at the poorly crafted frame with the beautifully crafted wallet inside. My eyes welled with tears, and it was well beyond ten seconds before I was again ready to turn and face my friend.

  When I did, I found him flipping the oilcloth back over his worktable suspiciously, but I didn’t get a chance to see what was beneath.

  I asked him: “What are you doing?” and he answered: “Nothing.”

  I knew he wasn’t meaning to raise my suspicions, but he was raising my suspicions. What I couldn’t decide was why he was trying to hide whatever was beneath the oilcloth from me. Was he lying about having given up? Was he, in fact, working on his masterpiece beneath that cloth? And if so, who had commissioned it? Someone more important than me? Didn’t he know who I had become? Or did it have nothing to do with tanning? Was it something so shameful that he couldn’t allow me to see it?

  I asked him: “What have you got beneath that oilcloth?” and he answered: “Nothing.”

  I took a step toward him and another until I was staring directly into his eyes.

  I said: “I demand to know what you’ve got beneath that oilcloth,” and he said: “None of your business,” but he must have seen from my expression how serious I was, because he reached behind him slowly and slid a hand beneath the oilcloth.

  He pulled his hand out and held it up between us. My eyes focused slowly, but when they did, I saw a thin white tube between his thumb and forefinger.

  “A joint?” I said.

  He laughed nervously, put the joint in his mouth, and lit it. I shoved him sideways and pulled the oilcloth from the table, like a magician, before he even had the chance to exhale. There were scales and bricks and piles of weed and joints and papers and bags scattered across the table. I averted my gaze.

  “Do you know the kind of trouble it would make for me if anyone were to find me here, in this apartment with,” I waved an arm in the direction of the table without looking back on it, “with this?”

  “It’s just pot,” said the tanner.

  “Pot, heroin, child pornography—I don’t care,” I said. I said: “I’m a role model!”

  “Not around here,” he said.

  I knew he was just speaking in anger. If I was a role model anywhere it was there, where they needed me. I knew it was best to ignore it. But then I worried that his outburst could be a symptom of a greater problem, something more than envy.

  “I can get you help,” I said, pulling the joint from his mouth and stomping it out on the floor. I put a hand on his shoulder. “We could say I was only here for an intervention. And then, when you’re clean, I could take you with me, to my appearances, as an example.”

  “Like a trained monkey,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, “like a monkey. Like a cleaned up monkey with a gift.”

  I was too busy pointing at the frame on the wall to see his wind-up. His fist hit my jaw and I fell backward into the wall behind me. As I slid down the wall to
the floor, the frame teetered above me and then fell, its glass shattering to shards beside me, the wallet coming loose from the mounting, landing on the carpet like a spent rag.

  I picked it up from the floor and looked it over. It wasn’t as perfect as it had been in my memory—there were some uneven stitches and some warped seams—but my memory had been built on potential, a potential I thought I could still see in the thing itself, its smooth surface, its intricate folds. I held it out toward him with both hands.

  “You had such a gift,” I said, “when did you give up on your dream?”

  He shook his head at his sore knuckles. “The store was called the tannery before I ever owned it,” he said. “The previous owner’s name. I was never a tanner.”

  “All of the greats feel that way sometimes,” I said. “Do you think I always feel like a successful public personality?”

  “No,” he said, taking a step toward me, “I was never a tanner.” He snatched the wallet from my hands and said: “This is the only wallet I ever made.”

  I was certain I had him there. I pulled the moldy wallet from my back pocket and waved it in front of him. “What about this?” I said.

  He winced as though prepared to admit defeat and said: “You made that one, technically.”

  We had agreed, on my last visit, never to mention the fact to anyone. I was happy with the wallet and he had been handsomely compensated, and I would never have admitted that I had had a hand in making it if he hadn’t insisted on bringing it up, if only in front of me.

  “That’s just a technicality,” I said, “and don’t mention it again.”

  It’s rare and unfortunate that I have to address my fellow man in this manner, and it always brings me pain to do so, but my manner in such situations is commanding and serious enough that the person I address knows not to raise his voice again. Or usually he does. My friend seemed to have forgotten.

  “I’ll mention whatever I want whenever I want to,” he said.

  I stood up slowly and ominously, and each step that I took announced the gravity of my intentions. I left an arm’s length, the length of one of my arms, which are longer than his, between us, and said: “Go ahead and mention it.”

  He laughed again. His laughter was becoming as irritating as his words.

  “You think I haven’t already?” he said.

  He started to add something else, no doubt some petty, childish expression of underclass envy that he would have regretted had I not knocked him unconscious with two blows before he’d had the chance.

  As he lay there at my feet, I found it hard to accentuate the positive. All I could see was the sniveling brat whose messes I’d always had to clean up, whose debts I’d always had to pay, whose fights I’d always had to fight, and I said aloud to him: “You will never be a tanner without me,” in hopes that it would haunt his sleep, that he would awaken after I’d finished and take it for truth. And to drive the truth home, I pulled down his dungarees, far enough to expose his bare ass and thighs.

  I saw straight off the mark from my previous visit, a long and uneven rectangle of pinkish scar tissue across his left buttock. I felt around behind me for a sliver of glass large enough and sharp enough to suit my purposes. I pressed the point to his flesh and punctured the skin. He awoke with a shriek.

  “Hold still,” I said. “Struggling will only increase your pain.”

  He went limp in my hands and I continued, dragging the shard slowly downward, across, up and back. When I pulled back the hide, using the glass to cut the skin from the gristle, he began to squirm again.

  “I’m not finished,” I said, pressing him flat to the floor. “I need a handbag yet.”

  I lifted his shirt and used the pen in my pocket to create a template over the better part of his back. And then I cut. And then he began to squirm again.

  “Go on,” I said. “Lie down on the bed.”

  He made his way to the bed, slowly and shakily, with whimpers and yelps. I went to his icebox and, finding no cube trays, pulled several packages from it. I went over to the bed and placed the frozen peas and beans and such upon his raw flesh.

  “Do you still keep the needles and thread in the drawer?” I said.

  He didn’t reply, unless you count a pathetic groan as a reply, so I opened the drawer and found them right where I’d left them, as though they hadn’t been touched since my last visit, and given the tanner’s abandonment of tanning, it was likely they hadn’t.

  I spent the next several hours trying to stitch his hide into a wallet and handbag with a number of false starts and backtrackings and plain old mistakes. They did not shape up to look as I’d imagined them, but that’s so often the case with any type of art, and besides, the act itself, the monotonous process of stitching the seams had a calming effect upon me, and soon I was remembering the good things again—my wife, who would overlook the imperfections and see through to the potential and also the vast effort I had made on her behalf, and then my friend who, despite the difficulties we’d had that evening, due, I was sure to his substance abuse, would, I was sure, remain my closest friend, and who, I hoped, might be inspired, after this latest lesson in his craft, to take it up again.

  The dawn sun was beginning to peek through the windows as I knotted the thread on my wife’s not quite pretty but lovingly crafted handbag. It illuminated the note I had made upon the back of my hand, reminding me that I’d intended to procure a matching notebook.

  My friend whimpered again from the bed. I pulled out my old wallet, pulled all of the cash from it, and dropped it on his table. He whimpered again. I looked at the back of my hand. I brought it to my mouth and licked it, rubbing the note into a light blue shadow across my skin. I counted to ten and then tried to decide if a notebook was really necessary.

  i can only hope that he still believes in redemption.

  An old man yelled: “Give it back!”

  It was early. Not in the morning, but in general. It was too early in general, for me, for the boy, for the old man who was yelling at the boy: “Give it back!” Again: “Give it back!”

  It was already turning out to be a bad day for redemption.

  The old man couldn’t see what the boy wanted with it. True, it was a bright, shiny penny, but that’s hardly enough reason for a maybe eight-year-old kid to tangle with a somewhat able-bodied and in any case full-grown man. Pennies are everywhere. He’d seen a penny—a slightly-less-shiny one—a block up the street from where they were standing, and stepped right over it without a thought. There hadn’t been anybody scrambling for that penny.

  All right, it wasn’t slightly less shiny. It was dull. It was tarnished. But one penny is worth one one-hundredth of a dollar regardless of gleam. Unless that penny carries sentimental value, and it’s no coincidence that the penny the boy wouldn’t give back was shiny. The old man had spent hours polishing it, and the others, even the freshly minted pennies, the ones that didn’t look like they needed it. Yes, there were others, and every one of them was threatened when any one of them was threatened. They were a confederacy of bright, shiny pennies.

  The old man set his box down on the sidewalk, cautiously, or arthritically, and walked toward the boy, cautiously or arthritically, with one hand outstretched.

  “Please,” he said, “just give it back.”

  The boy probably couldn’t understand why the old man wanted the penny so desperately, which is probably why he wouldn’t give it back.

  “There’s a penny back there a block,” said the old man.

  He gestured over his shoulder in the direction of the other penny.

  “On the sidewalk,” he said.

  The boy didn’t respond.

  “So you might as well give me mine, since there’s another one back there,” he said, gesturing again so the boy could go claim the other one for himself.

  Still no response.

  “I could go get it for you,” said the old man. “We could trade,” he said. “We could each have one.”

>   The boy’s silence caused him to continue.

  “Of course,” he said, just to be fair, “mine would be shinier cause I spent so much time polishing it.”

  The boy finally spoke: “Why would I want that when I got this?”

  He held it out between thumb and forefinger. The old man’s own thumb and forefinger were only inches from the penny. The proximity made things seem even more hopeless.

  “Because it’s mine,” said the old man. “That’s why it’s shiny,” he said, “because I polish it.”

  The boy didn’t seem to understand the politics of polishing and ownership.

  The old man took it upon himself to explain: “The one back there belongs to whoever picks it up,” he said. “It hasn’t been polished in a long time. You could go get it. You could polish it yourself.”

  The boy let the penny slip into his palm and closed his fist over it, dropping his arm to his side.

  “Maybe I will,” said the boy. “Maybe I’ll keep this one, and go get that one, and polish that one and have two.”

  “Not two,” said the old man. “One for each of us. Two people, two pennies.”

  “Then why don’t you go get the other one?” said the boy.

  “I don’t want the other one because it’s not mine,” said the old man. “There’s no redemption in it,” he caught himself, “for me. My redemption’s in the one you’re holding,” he said. “Part of my redemption.”

  He glanced down at his box, at the other polished pennies pasted to the top to form the word redemption. There was just a spot of glue where the penny that dotted the i—the penny the boy was holding—had fallen off.

  “Redemption?” said the boy. “It’s just a penny,” he said. “It isn’t worth any more than the one back there.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” said the old man. “So why don’t you give me mine and go get it?”

  “Why don’t you?” said the boy.