Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  He took a knife from the drawer, held it in his hands. Curiously, as if he wanted only to know what would happen, he drew the blade of the knife across his forearm, at the tender inner spot just below the elbow. It didn't hurt, not much. There was only the line the knife had made. Then the blood started. There was more than he'd expected. It welled up from the center of the cut, one bright drop, then came out along the full length. The blood briefly held a single line, gathering fatly. Then a drop from the lower edge meandered down his forearm and spread into the creases at his wrist. He watched the blood. He thought it might be possible that something was leaving him, and that once it was gone he'd be free. He was surprised at how little it hurt. He was surprised, too, at how much blood came out. A second drop trailed down his forearm, and a third. He realized it was going to fall to the floor and he quickly raised his arm to change the direction of the blood's flow but it was too late. A single spatter bloomed on the speckled white floor, and then another. He got a paper towel. He used it to wipe up the floor and then to wipe the blood off his arm. The blood kept coming and he kept wiping until the paper towel was entirely soaked with red. Holding the bloody paper towel in his good hand, he held his other arm under the faucet and let the water wash the blood away until it had stopped coming. He rinsed the sink out and scoured it with cleanser. He threw the bloody paper towel in the garbage, hid it under the dinner scraps and a half head of lettuce that had gone bad. But then he thought his mother might find it, anyway. It wasn't likely that she'd find it but if she did she'd ask him about it and he didn't know what he'd say. So he took the paper towel back out of the garbage can. Black flecks of coffee grounds had stuck to the blood, and a scrap of cellophane and a kernel of corn. He felt as if he might faint from the sight of garbage clinging to the blood. He didn't faint. Walking quietly, he took the paper towel into the downstairs bathroom. He thought he'd flush it down the toilet, but what if it stuck in the pipes? What if they called the plumber, and he came up with this wad of garbage and blood? Ben walked from room to room with it, in a mounting panic that made the rooms themselves stranger and stranger, with their comfortable chairs and needlepoint pillows, their vases full of flowers. What could he do with this rag of his blood? Where could he put it and feel certain it would not be found? It seemed his parents knew every moment of the house, every shadowed and concealed place. Finally, taking care to make as little noise as possible, Ben eased his way out the kitchen door and took the paper towel into the yard. It was a cool night, the grass was wet and icy under his bare feet. He walked quickly to the back fence, crouched, and dug a hole in the loose earth near the compost heap. He dug deep, almost to his elbow. The earth smelled cold and harsh, unfresh, like old clothes. He dug in a paroxysm of fear so intense it clouded his vision. At any time, one of his parents could turn on the outside light and look out the window, and if that happened he would have no explanation. He dropped the paper towel into the hole, filled and smoothed it with the palms of his hands. He jumped up again, relieved, but when he turned back toward the house it was changed. It was still a white house with a shingled roof and dark green shutters but it was not his house anymore and he ran to catch up with it, to get inside and back to his bed before it changed so much he could never get in again. Once he was in the kitchen, he felt better. The kitchen was immaculate. It was the kitchen he knew. He washed the dirt from his hands at the kitchen sink, then went quietly upstairs and bandaged the cut so it wouldn't leak onto his sheets. The bandage could be concealed, and by the following night he could claim to have cut himself in any number of ways. He got back into bed. He returned to himself; he mostly returned. He was able eventually to sleep, though before he fell asleep he was stricken with worry about the buried paper towel. He worried that it might be found, and he worried about something else, something crazy. He knew it was crazy, but he couldn't stop thinking about it. He pictured the paper towel rising up out of its little grave like the bloody ghost of somebody murdered. He imagined it floating around out there at the dark far end of the yard.

  1992/ What they wanted was to have the same day. Sometimes they got it. Sometimes Jamal went to school and hung with his friends and his mother went to work and they both came home. She made dinner. He did his homework. Cassandra called to talk trash, or stopped by for a cup of coffee before she got herself ready for the clubs. Jamal and his mother watched TV for a while, went to bed, let the night fold up around them with its pipes singing in the walls, its sirens and radios. Sometimes they got all that.

  Sometimes she was too sick for work and she spent the day on the sofa, reading or not reading, slipping in and out of a pale unsatisfying sleep. She moaned along with the doves that perched on the fire escape. Sometimes he came home from school and lived with her in the heavy air. Sometimes he stayed on the front stoop until late. On those days he sat, neither home nor away from home, listening to the passing radios and watching the haircuts walk by. He sat while the lights came on and he sat through a long portion of their burning as the street passed in its regular time.

  Sometimes when the old days thinned out he went to Cassandra's. He hoped to disappear there the way he used to, in with the mirrors and necklaces. He timed himself to the chatter of the sewing machine as she worked on her tulle and chiffon, her stitching of beads. But lately the air there was too close. There was no room for his long legs, the moves that wanted out. He got bored. When he was a little boy it was his favorite place, two small rooms so draped and layered there were no walls or floors, only the high white of the ceiling. On the walls and the floors were pearls and fake leopardskin and colored scarves and Oriental rugs and hats and old photographs and passages of yellowed lace. There was a blue velvet sofa and there were lamps with scenes painted on their shades and candlesticks and striped hatboxes and bouquets of dried roses in silver cups and spindly gold chairs and a tapestry where blue and brown people danced in ivory-colored wigs. There were shelves full of books and a tarnished trumpet and an old electric fan and satin boxes and carved wooden boxes and silver boxes and a smiling white Buddha with crackled skin and a framed painting of an ecstatic blond girl on a swing and two life-sized iron monkeys holding ashtrays on their heads. Jamal had loved it but now he didn't fit there, he'd grown too big. He'd joined a time that moved faster than Cassandra's sewing machine, all the brightly colored nothing that happened in her rooms.

  Cassandra grew tireder, tighter. She got impatient at her machine. She started smoking again.

  “You shouldn't do that,” Jamal told her one afternoon. It was March, nothing had put out any green. The trees in Tompkins Square Park still looked like they were made of cement.

  “I know, it's a filthy habit,” Cassandra said. “But there are just some places you can't go without a cigarette.” She sat sewing bugle beads on a black bodice, smoking big, with wrist and elbow, huge exhaled clouds in the spangled dimness. She was wearing her pink chenille robe. Beside her, one of the silent monkeys held up its ashtray.

  “It's bad for you,” Jamal said.

  “Honey, I know it's bad for me, do you think I need a ten-year-old to tell me that?”

  “Then don't do it.”

  She squinted at a bead. “With all due respect,” she said, “mind your own goddamn business.”

  “It is my business,” he said. “I'm breathing it, too.”

  “There's an easy solution to that problem,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Guess.”

  “You mean, leave?”

  “If the smoke is bothering you that much, there's a whole smoke-free world right on the other side of that door.”

  Jamal picked a scrap of white satin up from the floor, tore it in half. He liked the sound it made.

  “You going out tonight?” he asked.

  Cassandra wanted the same night over and over again but she believed in some hidden way that if she had the same night enough times it would all crack open, and something better than love would be revealed. Something better than music.r />
  “I am if I get this gown finished on time,” Cassandra said through a mouthful of pins. “I have to be more mindful of my customers these days, I don't have as many as I used to. It's nose to the grindstone, just like everybody else.”

  “I want to go out with you sometime,” he said.

  “The places I go are not for ten-year-old boys.”

  “What do you do when you go out?” Jamal asked.

  “We've talked about this before.”

  “I want to know again.”

  “Dance on top of the bar and talk to fools. If I thought you were missing anything, I'd take you. Trust me.”

  “Then why do you go out all the time?”

  “I have a talent for it. People should do whatever they're good at, don't you think?”

  “I want to come sometime.”

  “Okay, fine. You can come with me to the Pyramid, I'll go to the fifth-grade dance with you.”

  “You could come to the dance with me,” he said.

  Cassandra sewed and smoked. She didn't pause in the long work of being herself, but she let a silence fall onto her face. She pulled herself in, and the room was less intricately inhabited. Smoke shifted in the heavy golden air.

  “When's the next dance?” she asked in a voice that was not hers. This voice came from farther away, like a radio playing in the apartment next door.

  “Easter,” he said. “I don't think you'd like it.”

  “Don't worry, I don't want to come to the fifth-grade dance with you. I only wanted to know when the next one is.”

  “Easter. It's at Easter.”

  “Do you take a date?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You're growing up, aren't you?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Forgive me for being corny. You're growing up. You're turning into somebody.”

  “No,” he said. “I'm not.”

  “Jamal?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Do me a favor, all right?”

  “What?”

  “Don't grow up to be an asshole.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I've been a good mother to you, haven't I? A reasonably good mother, considering?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, if you're going to grow up without me, that's about all the advice I've got for you. Try not to be an asshole.”

  “Okay.”

  Cassandra sucked at her cigarette, exhaled a dense, ragged plume. “Okay now, out,” she said. “Zoe must have dinner ready by now, you shouldn't keep her waiting like this.”

  “I'm not ready to go,” he said.

  “Well, I'm ready for you to be gone.”

  She raised her head, spit a pin onto the rug. She was changing, growing smaller. Jamal wanted to snatch the cigarette out of her hand, tear the robe off her, push her naked out the door and into the yellow stink of the hallway, where the crack dealers talked their talk and women sang in other languages. He wanted to lock her out, get into her bed, and ignore her as she banged and pleaded.

  “No,” he said.

  “You get that little butt of yours home, you're not doing me any good here and your mother's all alone.”

  Jamal touched the leg of his chair, touched the cold curve of the monkey's ear. He had an urge to touch everything in the apartment, just touch it.

  “Well?” Cassandra said. Her skin blazed white. She had a skeletal grandeur, the aristocratic righteousness of a ghost.

  Jamal touched his own forehead, the back of his neck. Cassandra reached over and touched the same places he had touched. She pulled her hand away quickly, as if she'd been burned by his skin.

  When he first knew about it, Jamal had called it “eggs.” My mother has eggs. That was how he pictured it: bad eggs she carried, rancid and sulfurous. The eggs hurt her, but if she dropped them it would be worse. When somebody had eggs they couldn't keep them but they couldn't drop them, either.

  Now he knew the facts of blood. He wasn't stupid. But privately, inside his head, he still called it “eggs.” He still thought of his mother and Cassandra as coming back from a chicken house with their arms full of tainted eggs.

  He went home but he didn't go inside. It was one of the days he sat watching from the stoop. He sat on the concrete as the air turned blue, filled with particles of night. He watched men and women rushing toward whatever waited to happen to them. He watched dogs adoring the smells. He let into the building people who lived in the building, people he knew to be safe. He looked at the street and did not let his attention wander.

  When he went inside, it was later than it had ever been. She was there, so much like he'd pictured her that he thought she wasn't there at all. She was too expected, on the sofa with her pillows and Kleenex box, her book, her half-filled glass of water.

  “Do you know what time it is?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It's almost a quarter past ten.”

  “I know.”

  “Where've you been?”

  “Just out.”

  He couldn't tell her anything. He couldn't take her with him.

  “You can't stay out this late,” she said.

  He watched the room, its bright disorder. She'd started buying 100-watt bulbs for the lamps. There were shopping bags on the floor. A fishhook of hair lay sweat-plastered to her cheek.

  “Did you hear what I said?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then answer.”

  “What's the question?”

  She took a breath, and another. “The question,” she said. “The question is what makes you think it's okay at your age to stay out half the night like this.”

  “It isn't half the night.”

  “Do you know what it's like, sitting here since three in the afternoon, thinking you're on your way home from school? Seven hours ago. If Cassandra hadn't called me, I'd have had no idea where you were the whole seven hours, instead of just from six o'clock until now.”

  “I wasn't doing anything wrong,” he said.

  “You have to call me. You have to tell me where you are. Did you have any dinner? Did you do your homework?”

  “Sure.”

  “Jamal—”

  “What?” he said.

  “Please don't do this. I can't—I need you to be a little bit helpful. I need you to come home from school in the afternoons. I need you to tell me where you are when you go out.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She took a Kleenex from the box, didn't wipe her eyes or blow her nose. She tore it in half. She held the two pieces.

  “I don't know what works with you,” she said. “I'll do pretty much whatever I have to. Give me a hint, all right?”

  He couldn't say anything to her. They both knew what they wanted, but when the old days wouldn't open for them they were trapped. She was wrong on the sofa. He was wrong everywhere.

  “Jamal?” she said. Her eyes had the sickness, the plastic look. Wet but not wet. He tried to tell her that nothing would work, and the only way he could say it was by going into his room. He could feel her breathing in the living room. He lay in his bed, in the dark. He thought about himself, lying in the dark, thinking about himself. Not thinking about her.

  The next day he came home and found his uncle and aunt there. His aunt had brought Ben. They sat around the living room with his mother, sipping water like it was delicious. Had they been waiting for him?

  “Hi, Jamal,” Uncle Will said. Uncle Will performed his business: skeptical half smile, modest nod, a whole earnest nervous knuckle-cracking demonstration of attention.

  “Hi,” Jamal said.

  Aunt Susan kissed him. She was always sure. She moved in straight lines.

  Ben shook his hand. He was a boy who shook hands. He had shame around him, little invisible rays of it. He had a strangled politeness.

  Jamal figured it—he'd surprised them by coming home on time. They were here to help his mother through his absence. His presence made a problem.

&nbs
p; “You've grown,” Aunt Susan said. It wasn't true. He hadn't grown half an inch in the last year.

  Ben had grown almost a foot. Something invisible and frightened was threaded through his muscles and manners, the clean broad blue of his polo shirt. There was something starved about him, for all his bulk.

  “How's it going?” Uncle Will asked.

  “Okay,” Jamal answered. Quickly, he added, “Ben, you want to go play video games?”

  Ben looked at his mother. Aunt Susan looked at Jamal's mother, who looked at Uncle Will.

  “You just got here,” Jamal's mother said.

  “I know.”

  Ben said, “Okay.” His voice came from the big blue swell of his chest, spoke through his mouth.

  “Half an hour,” Aunt Susan said. “No more.”

  Uncle Will said, “It'd be nice to spend some time with you, Jamal. I hardly ever get to see you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  What he hated about other people's concern was how visible it made you. All he wanted was to be unseen, and to watch.

  “You're just going to the place on Second Avenue?” his mother asked.

  “We'll be back in half an hour,” he said.

  “Okay. Bye.”

  He got out the door, with Ben behind him. He took a quick look back at his mother and his aunt and uncle. He thought about the ocean, that cold green nowhere. He thought about his big cousin, nervous and strange as a horse.

  Out on the street he asked Ben, “Do you really want to play video games?”

  Ben let the question fall, looked down at the ground where it lay.

  “I guess,” he said. “You don't want to?”

  He thought there was a right and a wrong answer. He wanted to get it right.