The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx

by Arthur Nersesian

  Paul felt there was a small dose of hysteria around the issue, but nonetheless took the precaution of installing stronger locks on their doors. Sure, the area had taken a hit and people had left in a panic, but he believed things were slowly stabilizing. A few of the old timers, still committed to their faith that the neighborhood would be okay, were holding the line, believing that this acute depression would eventually reverse. It was just a matter of time. A silver lining to all this was that as a wave of new immigrants moved into the communities, older neighbors who had once shunned the Moses family were now warming back up to them. People were again saying hi.

  Over the dinner table that Easter, Paul pointed out how, despite everything, they were really quite lucky. They had barely escaped losing their home, but after eight years of teaching Paul was now earning a good wage at a job he enjoyed. Lucretia, too, was getting more bookkeeping work than she could handle. Financially, things were actually going quite well. As soon as summer vacation began when Bea finished kindergarten, Paul decided they had to get out of the city before things got too hot and wild. Locking up the house, he drove Lucretia and Bea up to the Adirondacks for the month of July. He had just taken out hefty theft and fire insurance policies. Glimpsing the place through his rearview mirror, he half hoped it would be burnt down when they returned.

  That time in the country was just what the doctor ordered. Every moment was either relaxing or romantic. In early August Lucretia announced that she had failed the rabbit test again—she was pregnant. Their second child would be born in April.

  Exhausted and covered in sweat, Uli prepared for his final surge by pouring the last remaining bottle of water over his burning scalp. Moving slowly upward, he was able to pull himself onto a narrow ledge that seemed to mark the top of the sealed elevator shaft. The heat was becoming too intense to proceed.

  Uli rested for several minutes, then strapped the heatretardant body armor fashioned from the trash cans over his clothes. The massive blue flame was blasting away just ten feet above him. He had to somehow get around it to reach the earth’s surface. He removed the flattened can from his head and used it to stab into the compressed dirt, sending cascades of sand down the narrow shaft. As he progressed, he could feel his hair burning on his head. Taking occasional breaks to cover his scalp, he pressed on, shoveling a thick current of sand down past him for the next twenty minutes or so. Soon he had created a narrow upward rut along the side of the blasting spout of blue flame.

  Retreating back down the shaft to where the heat abated, he rubbed his fingers over the blisters along his head, neck, and arms and caught his breath. Using the last vestiges of his strength, he scampered like a sand crab up the narrow trench he had just created along the side of the giant fiery crater. Scooping the relatively cool sand around him for relief, his hand suddenly broke through into open space. He frantically hauled himself up and collapsed onto the desert floor. Drenched in sweat, too tired and singed to even remove the body armor, he simply lay there panting under the burning sun. Smoke rose from his burnt clothes. After a few minutes, he pulled the hot metal plates off his chest and arms and passed out.

  39

  In late January, a week of unseasonably warm weather started melting the frozen crusts of snow. When Paul’s teaching semester began, there was a sense of hope. Lu-cretia was in her seventh month of pregnancy and she somehow knew this one was going to be a boy. Though she didn’t say anything, she wanted to name him Paul Junior.

  Then one day in early February, Mr. Rafael, the new Negro head of the science department, popped his head into Paul’s third-period classroom just as the kids were beginning a quiz. “Paul,” he said, “I’ll cover for you.”

  “Why? What’s going on?” he asked, stepping out into the hallway.

  “It’s your wife, Mr. Moses,” a middle-aged police officer spoke up behind Rafael. “She’s passed away.”

  “What?” Paul asked, bewildered.

  “We’re not sure what happened,” a second, younger cop said. “Someone found her on the ice, her skull was fractured.”

  “Lucretia’s …?” He couldn’t even envision it. It was absolutely inconceivable. “Where is she? Where’s Lucretia?”

  “Come on,” the first cop said, leading him outside. “We’ll take you there.”

  “One of the neighbors found her on the sidewalk in front of your house. She must’ve been lying out there awhile. He called an ambulance,” the younger of the two cops explained over the siren as they sped to the hospital. “Someone else said they saw some hooligan running away, but she still had her purse on her … Or else maybe she just slipped on the ice.”

  Paul wasn’t listening anymore. Once they arrived at Cabrini Hospital, a nervous young doctor said that they would need about thirty more minutes before their examination of the body was complete.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “We’re not sure yet, but it looks like a subdural hema-toma, a head injury due to her fall on the ice.”

  “Did she … just slip or was she … attacked?” Paul could barely speak.

  “We’re trying to ascertain that right now,” the doctor replied. “If she was hit we might find other marks or bruises, but she might’ve just fainted, which isn’t uncommon for a pregnant woman.”

  “How about the baby?”

  “I’m sorry, the fetus died with her.”

  Paul leaned against the clean white wall and slid to the floor. Over the course of the afternoon, Lori and several other neighbors came to visit him in the hospital, but Paul just stared off in shock.

  “I’ll get Bea from school,” Lori offered. “She can stay with Bill and me until you’re ready.”

  Consciousness is as tangible as any matter. It, too, must obey the laws of physics. With the velocity of decades behind it, Paul reasoned, a life can’t just come to an abrupt halt in space or time. Even if the body machine fails, the psychic energy of Lucretia’s being, the components and particles of her consciousness, have to be propelled somewhere.

  Soon a detective approached him.

  “Where is she? Where is she?” he called out.

  A sympathetic desk nurse got on the phone and rang the pathologist in the basement who said the exam was over and the grieving husband could come down and see his wife’s body. The nurse directed Paul to the basement and he was brought into a viewing room. Lucretia was wheeled out on a gurney and he was left alone with her. Only her face was visible. A sheet covered her nude, pregnant trunk. A black and red bruise the size of a walnut pushed out from the front of her skull. It seemed so unfair that this small broken part could end the rest of her. Paul pulled up a hard wooden chair and stretched forward, laying his head and arms over the top of her cold chest. The pathologist returned to the room ten minutes later to find Paul half-sitting, half-laying next to his wife.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said gently, “but I’m going off duty now.”

  “When can I see her again?”

  “We’ll surrender the body to whatever funeral home you want us to,” the doctor explained. Paul nodded. He couldn’t breathe. The pathologist asked Paul something … He couldn’t really … He shook his head no … The man led him … to the elevators … upstairs, instead of leaving … he stayed in the hospital waiting room … one floor above the morgue … near … his wife’s body … for as long as he could … passing out in the chairs … then waking up … staying until … the next … day … Time kept pushing forward.

  The desk nurse told the hospital social worker that a friend of Paul’s had left her number. She called a Lori Mayer, who called Mr. Rafael at Paul’s school and left a message that due to a personal tragedy he probably wouldn’t be back for a while.

  Lori and her husband then visited their old friend Stuart Fell at Fell’s Funeral Parlor on East Tremont Avenue. They agreed to go see Paul together at the hospital and work out the arrangements. A few hours later, when they met him in the waiting area, he nodded them off as if he were in deep t
hought.

  Lori asked the desk nurse if Paul could get some kind of help. Soon the hospital psychiatrist, a bearded man named Dr. Hugo, diagnosed Paul as suffering from an acute case of pathological grief. He gave him a tranquilizer and held him overnight.

  The next afternoon, Paul seemed to be regaining connection. When he returned home, Lori brought Bea over. The little girl gave her daddy a kiss and told him that she’d heard that “Mommy is with God.”

  “I spoke to Detective Chalmers who’s handling the case,” Lori told Paul. “He said they’ve put up notices to see if anyone has spotted Toto.”

  “Oh, right,” Paul replied absently. He hadn’t even registered that her old Yorkie was missing.

  When Lori left, Paul slumped into an armchair and watched as his little girl moved cheerfully around the house collecting dolls and other toys to play with. All he could think was that every item she touched had been bought by Lucretia. He couldn’t accept that he wasn’t going to see her again. If I ever adjust to her loss, that would reveal the limit of my love for her. But her love for me was limitless.

  When his brother had erased him in the summer of ’47, making him a ghost around Midtown, she alone had found him outside Horn & Hardart’s and brought him back to the land of the living. Even when he had despised himself, she had rescued and revived him. She had become a kind of cast for his broken life, and now that she was gone he didn’t even want to try to stand. Though he loved his little girl and knew his wife would want him to take care of her, he simply couldn’t focus. Lori, when she dropped by around dinnertime to see how he was doing, found Bea eating from a bag of moldy bread.

  “Would you like to come over for supper?”

  Paul shook his head.

  “What do you want?”

  “Take her.”

  Lori said okay and bought Bea back home with her. The next day, Bill Mayer came by to tell him that Lucretia’s body was now at the funeral parlor. The viewing would go on for the next two days. Solitude was all he desired, but he knew what Lucretia would want. It took great effort to put on a suit and comb his hair. When he arrived and saw Lucretia in the coffin, he had to resist the urge to climb in and just lay with her, even be buried with her. He sat next to the box and stared downward as people filed along and gave their condolences. Everyone from the neighborhood stopped by, signed the book, and paid their final respects.

  Lori arrived with Bea, who was dressed very nicely, and pulled up a chair for the little girl to stand on. Looking down into the coffin, Bea whispered, “I love you, Mommy. Goodbye, Mommy. Goodbye.”

  The heat from the bright blue flame of the blasted pipeline—even at a healthy distance—was stinging Uli’s burnt face, pulling him awake. Half of him felt frozen, the other half fried. Calling out Karen’s name repeatedly to no response, Uli finally admitted to himself that he must have hallucinated hearing her voice from the bottom of the elevator shaft. Despite the cold desert night, the phenomenon of freedom compelled him to simply stare at the massive flame as though it carried the very mystery of life.

  Eventually, Uli crawled away into the surrounding desert. Under the vast twinkling sky, it was almost as if he had remembered infinity and all its possibilities. Uli felt born again: The sandy breeze seizing his body reminded him that the planet was alive with both cruelty and tenderness. The fact that he was no longer trapped underground with physically and mentally impaired cannibals made him giddy.

  The crescent moon offered little light. Around him in the darkness, all he could see other than the distant blue flame were the outlines of hills and large rocks. He was hungry and thirsty and knew he wouldn’t last long. Despite his exhaustion and pain, it would be better to walk now, at night, than under the great weight of tomorrow’s unbearable sun. He rose and staggered about a thousand feet before spotting a small trench into which he collapsed.

  A few hours later he began hearing sounds. Several shapes were moving across the desert floor. He thought they were some kind of nocturnal creatures at first, but as the dark blue sky lightened, he could see they were people. Three men passed far off to his left. They appeared to be wearing striped vests, but otherwise they looked dirty and bewildered like those trapped below. The group was heading toward the large geyser of flame that roared forth from the ruptured pipe. The men seemed to be discussing something. Abruptly, two of them started pummeling the third, until the man collapsed to his knees. As the attackers moved away, Uli decided to wait several minutes before cautiously approaching the victim.

  40

  The motorcade made its way to Woodlawn Cemetery and Lucretia’s body was interred next to her mother’s grave. Afterward, Paul and Bea were driven back to the house. A couple hours later, Lori stopped by and discovered them sitting quietly in the living room, both still in their funeral clothes. She fed Paul and took Bea back home with her. Paul lingered around the house over the next few days, just sleeping and moving silently from room to room. On the afternoon of the third day, he heard a knock at the door. He answered to find Leon standing there awkwardly in torn overalls.

  “Sorry I didn’t make it to the funeral. After my mom’s death, I just couldn’t bear going through it all over again.” Leon removed a fifth of whiskey from a brown paper bag.

  Paul led him into the kitchen and set down two glasses.

  “First my mom, now your wife,” Leon said.

  “None of this would’ve happened if …” Paul couldn’t finish. He sucked down the burning liquor like cold water on a hot day. Leon had barely finished his first glass by the time Paul had knocked back most of the bottle. When Leon realized that Paul had passed out and pissed his pants, he shook his friend awake and told him to clean up and get dressed.

  “Why?”

  “I need some company.”

  Leon drove Paul in his old pickup a few blocks south into Morrisania and parked in his driveway. His dogs barked nonstop as he helped Paul inside. His large home was filled with foil wrappers, empty bottles, soiled clothing, and old newspapers. Over the next week, Paul ate, drank, napped, and watched ballgames on TV, all in the same tight armchair that had once belonged to Leon’s mom.

  Paul called Lori one afternoon and asked in a slightly drunken slur if he could speak to Bea.

  “She’s at school, Paul. It’s 2 o’clock.”

  “I’m slowly getting back on my feet,” he mumbled.

  “No problem.”

  “Can you tell Bea I’ll come get her tomorrow after school?”

  “Sure, she’ll love that.” After a pause, Lori said, “Paul, I got a call from your boss at school, Mr. Rafael. He found someone to take over your classes, but he needs to know whether or not you’ll be back next term.”

  “Great,” Paul replied without really listening. Upon hanging up, he looked out the window and glimpsed the railings of that goddamned freeway several blocks north.

  “He’s always taken everything from me,” Paul murmured to Leon. “Now it’s time to take back.”

  “You probably want to kill more than ever now, but …” Leon trailed off.

  “If you kill someone they don’t feel pain. We have to let him feel—”

  “It’s over now. Maybe you should just live in peace.”

  “Fuck no! What that cocksucker did to this neighborhood … And those who stayed have been subject to years of tumult and harassment. There isn’t a wall in my house that doesn’t have cracks running through it. Not to mention that dust. Bea spent nights coughing herself raw. I mean, Lucretia would run tape along the doors and windows and we still couldn’t keep out that goddamned dust and—”

  Suddenly, shouts and screams erupted outside. Bottles were shattering, kids were fighting.

  “This used to be a good street. Now we’re in the middle of a fucking ghetto that’s getting worse every day.”

  “Can you blame everything on one fucking highway?”

  “THAT FUCKER TOOK EVERYTHING!!!” Paul shouted, and grabbing his overcoat he stormed out the door.

&
nbsp; He marched angrily up to Lucretia’s home, but as soon as he got to the door he felt it. Her presence was there waiting for him. He stumbled back down the stairs and wound his way along the dark, chilly streets back to Leon’s place. Once inside, he gulped water right out of the faucet until he gasped for air, then he kicked off his shoes and plunked down in Leon’s mother’s armchair where he thought, I’m taking it all—the whole damn city—down with me!

  He awoke very late the next day and barely made it to Bea’s school in time to pick her up. After buttoning her coat, Paul took his daughter’s little hand and led her down East Tremont Avenue.

  “Daddy, I’m hungry,” she said.

  Paul bought Bea her favorite meal, a slice of pepperoni pizza and, from a nearby diner, a side of creamed corn. Back at home, he gulped down a fifth of Scotch as she ate and they both watched television. Soon he passed out on the floor. When Lori woke him up at 9, she said that Bea had run across the backyard shouting, “Daddy’s dead!”

  “Well, obviously I’m not.”

  “Paul, little girls are very fragile.”

  “All right,” he said softly, then went to the bathroom and shut the door.

  “Should I bring her back home with me tonight?”

  “No,” he growled through the closed door, “not tonight.”

  Lori helped the little girl into her pajamas, made her brush her teeth and say her prayers, then put her to bed.

  “Goodnight, Mommy,” Bea whispered into space. Lori gave her a kiss on the cheek and sat next to her until she fell asleep.

  Early the next day, Paul dressed his daughter and gave her a Hershey’s chocolate bar. After dropping her off at school, he headed south to Leon’s yard in Morrisania. His friend wasn’t there, but Paul let himself in and rooted through his fridge, nibbling on a half-eaten turkey hero he found inside. He searched for a drink, but the house was dry.