by Unknown
I heard something click a moment later. When I exhaled and opened my eyes, Listen was gone. I touched my face. It felt no different.
Back in my car I adjusted the rear-view mirror and caught a glimpse of myself.
Then wept.
I find it difficult to watch the local news or read The Ally these days. Every time I come across a story about a murder, a sexual assault, a beating, suicide, or any one of a thousand commonplace horrors we’ve grown so accustomed to, I wonder if the person who committed the act might have done otherwise if only they could have found some stranger to listen to their story.
It’s not that stories like these never appeared in the paper before, it’s just I don’t recall there having been so many of them.
I don’t sleep as well as I used to.
I received a postcard from Listen: Having a fun time—wish you were wonderful! (A joke, dear boy.) Nine to go. I think this turned out rather well. You were still wearing it, by the way.
On the other side was the photograph he’d taken of me in the park that day. I am leaning against the picnic table with my eyes closed. My face seems to glow in the sunlight which whispers a thousand soft colors of thanks. It is a peaceful face. A beautiful face. A compelling, kind, compassionate face.
It belongs to a stranger.
The question that keeps nagging me is: Why?
Why, in order to know the face of God, must the same horrors caused by our having not known it be perpetuated?
You could argue that these horrors on the local news and in The Ally border on the insignificant when compared to the holistic catalogue of human misery. You would be right, I suppose. Unless you suspect you’re the cause. And, no, filing it under “Sins of Omission” and going out for sushi doesn’t help much.
I miss being asked to pose for pictures, be them of myself alone or in a group. I miss not being asked, just having someone click away. But mostly, I miss having complete strangers come up to me with their stories. I didn’t think I would, but since that day with Listen I’ve come to realize just how much that meant to me.
Like I said, I don’t sleep so well anymore.
The people I know and work with treat me differently. So do the members of my family. Nothing major, mind you, but there’s a certain caution in their eyes whenever they’re around me.
A few nights ago, after Amy, Tommy, and I had gone to a movie (I see the two of them nearly every day now), we went for a pizza. While waiting for it to be delivered to the table, Tommy begged some quarters to play a video game. He smiled when I handed him the money, then exchanged a “You-Gonna-Ask-Him-Or-Not?” look with his mother before sprinting over to the machines.
I stared at my sister. “What was that about?”
She reached across the table and took hold of my hand. “You know that Tommy and I really enjoy spending time with you, right?”
“Okay … ?”
“You’ve been really wonderful ever since the hospital—”
“—Christ, I was just as relieved as you that it was only migraines.”
“Oh, the medicine works wonders, Joel, it really does. It makes the pain go away and Tommy says sometimes it makes him feel all ‘shiny.’ Isn’t that the coolest way to describe it?”
“Yes, but that still doesn’t tell me what that look was about.”
“Tommy’s been worried about you, and so have I. Hell, most everyone in the family has.”
“Because … ?”
“You don’t look like yourself. I mean, you look like yourself, but there’s something … I don’t know … something missing, I guess. You look so sad these days.”
I squeezed her hand and smiled, though I doubt it registered with her.
“I’m doing okay.” Which wasn’t exactly a lie, but wasn’t exactly the truth, either; it was just safe. I keep hoping that “safe” will help me sleep.
“You sure?”
“As sure as anyone can be, I guess.”
“Then why do you look so sad all the time?”
Would you understand? I thought. If I were to tell you the story, would you even believe me, or would hearing it only add to the burdens you already carry? I wish there were some way you could answer me without my having to say anything, but that’s a miracle I can only depend on, not believe in, so I will seek safety from my sins of omission in a kind-of silence.
“I don’t know,” I said, then shrugged. “Maybe I’ve just got one of those faces.”
All Hands
JOHN R. PLATT
When we read John’s Platt’s submission, it was late in the evening, and we had spent most of it writing rejection slips. We liked “All Hands,” but we were tired, and could no longer trust our judgment. So we put it in our possible file, and figured we would get back to it sooner or later. But something weird happened: the next day, and the days that followed, neither one of us could the story out of minds. That could mean only one thing—it was a Borderlands story.
7 am. The alarm clock rings. Jerry reaches up and hits the snooze button with hands that are not his own.
White curtains on the bedroom window do little to block out the morning sun. In the yellow glow, he examines the new day’s gift.
Strong hands today. Calloused. Course hairs on the knuckles. The fingernails are rough and chipped. He flexes the fingers, feels muscles tense and twist. The skin is a sunburned red, much darker than the flesh on his wrists.
He likes today’s hands. They have character.
He changes his mind about going back to sleep, turns the alarm off, and heads into the shower.
The hands can’t type, but his arms know what to do. He extends the pointer fingers and hunts and pecks forty words a minute. Not bad. Still, he remembers the day he wore the hands of a speed typist. He finished early that day and left halfway through the afternoon.
Most of the hands don’t have any particular skills. They all look and feel and experience the world around them differently, but for the most part, they do what he needs them to do.
Around noontime, Bob Brady comes by Jerry’s cubicle. They go to lunch at the local diner. Jerry is surprised to find the hands holding the silverware European style. He’s not used to it. It slows him down while he eats. His food grows cold before he finishes.
“Should’ve ordered a burger,” Bob jokes. That’s Bob. The office comedian.
At home in the evening, Jerry takes advantage of the strong hands to finally hang a shelf in the living room. Proud of his work, he also fixes the leaky kitchen sink and ties up a month’s worth of newspaper for recycling before calling it a night.
On his way to bed, he stops and washes the hands as carefully as he can. Best to leave them in good condition. Good stewardship, that’s his motto.
Summer turns to fall, and fall to winter. Hands come and hands go. Jerry buys gloves in bulk, never knowing what size he will need to wear on any given day. Some hands don’t mind the cold, but others shiver and twitch no matter how thick the gloves. They obviously come from warmer climates.
The hands come in all shapes and sizes, colors and ages. He buys a dozen different brands of moisturizer and lotion, never sure if he’s using the right thing. Some days the hands get dry and chapped. Once he experiences what must be an allergic reaction. He feels a pang of guilt about that, but how much can he do?
The aged hands are infrequent, but he has learned to stock a supply of arthritis medicine, just in case.
He feels most awkward with the female hands. He spends those rare days in his cubicle, trying not to be seen.
One morning, he wakes with a child’s hands. Tiny, pink, newborn. He holds them up to the light, and can see the bones through the skin. They lack the strength to turn off the alarm clock, so he wraps the power cord around his ankle and yanks it from wall socket.
He calls out sick that day. It takes him an hour to figure out a way to dial the phone.
At lunch again with Bob, wearing a black man’s hands, he mentions that he feels lucky. It could be wo
rse. He knows a guy who knows a guy whose cousin wakes up with different feet every morning. Jerry can’t imagine what it must be like to have to buy shoes for every foot size. The gloves are bad enough.
“Yeah, but think of the poor sap who’s got your hands,” Bob jokes.
Jerry gets a distant look on his face. He’s wondered about his hands so many times. It’s why he takes good care of the hands he has. He hopes someone else is doing the same.
Spring. On a business trip to San Jose, a man comes up to Jerry in the tiny airport. Older, distinguished, wearing a suit ten times more expensive than Jerry’s, the man holds out his hand as he makes his introductions. As they shake, Jerry feels something … familiar. A pull beyond even that of the man’s charismatic glow.
The older man smiles. “I hope you’re taking good care of them.” Without looking at the hands on his wrists, Jerry knows that they belong to the man standing in front of him.
His throat goes dry. “I-I’d give them back to you, if I could,” he says in a weak voice. He pulls at the wedding band on the right hand. “I can give this to you …”
“Don’t bother,” the gentleman says. He shows off the tanned, athletic hands he’s wearing, and smiles again. “I got divorced last year. Keep it!” And with that, he’s off, disappearing into the crowd.
Jerry sighs as he heads towards the security line. He was hoping that if he had the older man’s hands, the other man would have had his.
He would really like to see them again.
He doesn’t keep the ring. It would feel too much like theft.
About a month later, Jerry wakes up without benefit of the alarm clock and knows without even opening his eyes that his hands have returned to him. He throws back the covers and holds them up in front of his face. He smiles like a kid at Christmas, flips on the light and turns the hands over and over in front of him.
The nails need trimming, but other than that, they’re in pretty good shape. A bit older, a bit wiser, a little black and blue along the side of one thumb. He has a quick memory of the hand getting slammed in a door.
He wonders what other memories they have. None come.
That day, Jerry goes to work but blows off his assignment, sits at his desk and types out poetry all day long. At lunch, he and Bob go to the health club and play a game of basketball. He buys a disposable camera and takes a roll of pictures of his body, back together and whole at long last.
At the office, people who normally shy away from him notice something different, smile at him in the hall. In the break room, he runs in to Bonnie from corporate communications, and asks her out for a drink after work. She looks at his hands, then says yes.
That night, he caresses a woman’s skin for the first time in years.
He wonders what his hands have seen and felt in the time they’ve been gone.
They don’t tell him any stories, as he loses himself in the moment.
Afterwards, Bonnie dresses in the dark, pecks him on the cheek and disappears.
The next morning, it all begins again.
Faith Will Make You Free
HOLLY NEWSTEIN
Holly Newstein is a new writer who has published her fiction in several anthologies and magazines. Her story which follows is the first thing we’d ever read by her. We were both immediately struck by her ability to tell her tale in a narrative voice that is not only compelling and confident, but also totally believable.
Moze was just another baby-faced kid in the induction center back in ’43. Scared and nervous, but willing to go to war for his country. Like all us other guys, he sat on the wooden benches, fidgeting as he waited his turn for his physical. But youth and nerves and patriotism were about all Moze had in common with the rest of us.
He wore a strange black hat, and straying out from under the brim were soft brown curls, shiny as a girl’s, framing his round face. A thin beard covered his chin, and his ankle-length coat of black gabardine might have been fashionable a century or two ago. He kept chewing on his lower lip as he waited, while the rest of us smoked and speculated on the Yankees’ prospects this year. I knew the war had changed everything, but until I saw Moze, I didn’t realize how much.
There were hundreds of other Jews like me enlisting—Reform or Conservative, ready to go off and fight for our country—for truth, justice and the American Way. We talked of marching triumphantly into Berlin, and of spitting in Der Fuehrer’s face. But Moishe Abramowicz was the only Hasidim I ever met in the service. The Hasidim were men of prayer, of peace. They stayed in the synagogues all day and argued abstract points of Talmudic law—when they weren’t swaying with joy as they sang the ancient Hebrew prayers. They kept to themselves, in their little sections of Brooklyn—Williamsburg and Crown Heights. They spoke and read Yiddish, a language my parents forbade me to use.
“You’re an American. Speak English!” they would say. They never used Yiddish when speaking to us, but later in the kitchen my folks would be arguing about their meshugganah kinderlach. Go figure.
We wore yarmulkes only on Shabbat and the Holy Days. But once the sun went down on Saturday nights, we went dancing in the jazz clubs in Harlem. We kept kosher at home—but ate cheeseburgers on summer afternoons at Coney Island. We went to Hebrew school and studied Torah, but as soon as it was over, we met at the vacant lot for stickball games. Some of the older guys hung out on the corner at night, smoking Camels and wolf-whistling at girls.
For me, it was all part of being an American Jew from Rosedale, in the Bronx. You kept your faith, but first and foremost, you were an American. The Hasidim remained proudly unassimilated, Jews who just happened to live in New York, going about their business in their strange black coats and hats just as they had for hundreds of years in hundreds of other lands.
Moze caught my eye and smiled, a nervous, sad smile. I grinned back and extended my hand. He shook it.
Such a simple thing to do, shake hands and be friends. Who knew? At boot camp I saw Moze come out of the barber’s chair clean-shaven, pais gone, nothing on his head but inch-high stubble and tears in his eyes. They did allow him to wear his tallit under his clothes; sometimes the fringes would show when his shirttail came loose from his pants. Other than that, we soon forgot he was anything more than a regulation GI like the rest of us.
We slept next to each other in the barracks. Moze often cried and moaned in his sleep, but I figured it was homesickness. A lot of the guys did that.
Our friendship grew closer. We were two people who would never have met in the ordinary world—Jews with nothing in common but Torah. In his eyes, I guess I was a worldly and uneducated heretic. To me, he was exotic. He had studied not only Torah and the Talmud, but also the Kabbalah and mystical Judaic texts.
At night, as we lay in the barracks, we talked and learned about each other. I told him about movies, baseball and jazz, Rita and Betty, DiMaggio and Sir Duke. He listened to me politely and shook his head at the flashy, Godless goyishe world. But then he told me tales from the Zohar, the Book of Radiance. He told me of Shekinah, the female side of God, and how we are all part of the mending of the worlds, the drawing forth of the divine. He told me how God created the world from the Hebrew alphabet and the ten sefirot—the sacred words. Night after night, he held me spellbound, like a rabbinical Scheherazade.
But there was always about him a sadness, unspoken, yet it clung to him like a fine gray mist.
One night I asked him the question I’d wanted to ask since I’d first seen him.
“Why did you enlist, Moze?”
He looked at me, his brown eyes wide with pain. Then he closed his eyes and sighed. Quickly I added, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. It’s okay if you don’t…”
“No, Ben. It’s just that I … well, it’s the dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“Yes. Horrible dreams. Every night I see them … these prisoners, at least I think they are prisoners. They are being beaten by men with guns. They are crouching naked and defens
eless like animals, in their own filth. They are being poisoned and burned. They turn and hold their arms out to me. Burned flesh hanging in black strips from their bodies. Their sightless eyes roll back in their shaven heads. Worst of all are the children …” Moze’s voice trailed off, and he sighed again, deeply.
“I know that I must go and fight in this war. These dreams have something to do with our people, Ben.”
I knew he wasn’t talking about our fellow Americans. “Go on,” I said.
“I told my father and my rabbi, I must do something about this. They said no. Vengeance is the Lord’s, not mine. My father forbade me to fight. But I could not sleep at night. I had to go. Finally, I enlisted—remember, that day I met you,” he said. “When I came home and told my family, my father wrapped himself in his tallit and began reciting shiva, mourning for me as if I were already dead. My mother kissed my eyes, my face, with tears running down her cheeks …” His voice shook, and he stopped for a moment. I heard him swallow hard in the darkness. Then, with new strength, he said, “But I am alive, and I will find a way to fight.”
I remembered saying farewell to my parents in the swirling hubbub of Penn Station. My father had smiled through his tears as he punched my shoulder.
“Go get ’em, Benjamin,” he said. Then he pulled me into a bear hug.
My mother pressed a bag of homemade cookies into my hand. “Write, son. Write me every day. Promise me …”
“All right already, Ma. Geez,” but I hugged her, too. And then I had turned and ran onto the train as if I were afraid they would pull me back to them—or that I might let them.