Falling Idols (2 page)

So to speak.

While fall’s vainglorious colors deaden to rusts and browns, and drab wet shadows lengthen across the city, you feel yourself trapped in freefall. The most appealing thing you can think of is the end of it all, by chance or by your own determined hand … yet a spark of hope lingers on, that maybe there’s something out there worth surviving for, if only you could find it.

It turns you into as restless a wanderer as any junkie hoping to score, as an insomniac, as one of Arthur’s knights looking for the Holy Grail. Shoes married to the pavement, you submerge within the wretched refuse. The teeming shores begin at the stoop of the building where you used to live with
her
. Where you sleep, still, although you seem to have quit living months ago.

You don’t even know what you’re seeking, do you? Only that it’s entirely up to you to find it, to make of it your new life and purpose. Nothing and no one else can do this for you. You take heart, for it can be done: Life, like death, can be as random and abrupt as a brick hurtling from overhead.

*

“Now you take me, for instance,” says Stavros, the old gentleman you’ve come to know and like. “My whole family killed in the war and me just eleven years old. Would I be coming to this country if this hadn’t happened? No, no, I don’t think so. All this life I’ve had here? It would be unknown to me.”

Mornings, before work, you’ve taken to stopping by a sidewalk cafe where Stavros holds his solitary court, drinking cup after cup of coffee. Against the autumn chill he wears a bulky knit sweater and on his head a flat billed cap, and if back in Greece he would look like any ordinary fisherman. Here, though, he seems exotic, a rogue and an adventurer.

“Do you ever think you’d’ve been better off if things had just stayed the same?” you ask.

He laughs, showing his great mouthful of strong, stained teeth. “Never. God rest their poor souls, every one of them, but these were people, let me tell you, who’d clutch a child to their bosoms ‘til it suffocated. It wouldn’t have been a bit different with me.” Stavros peers into his coffee, the twinkle in his eye sharpening into something more cunning. “I was liberated. Freed to become all the things that my first life kept away.”

He tells you stories, as he does each morning since you first paid him attention. Tells you what it was like to cross an ocean and see the world unfolding with eleven-year-old eyes. You listen, and you breathe in the scents of coffee and buses, watching both his seafarer’s face and the brisk sidewalk passage of everyone who, unlike you, is going to arrive at work on time this morning.

He’s the only friend, new or old, who doesn’t seem to mind being around you. And you wonder: Which of you is more desperate for a companion?

You’re not sure when you first became aware of it, only that it seemed to imperceptibly creep up on you. Something you might’ve noticed the moment you sat down but only acknowledged after nearly an hour: Someone is waving at you. Across the busy street and down one building; a second floor window, ornately archaic, in contrast with the more modern storefront below. Few ever pay any mind to the extinct architecture above their heads. Amazing, the way gargoyles can hide in plain sight.

It’s no one you know — you’re quite sure of it, just as you’re sure it’s you this woman is waving at. Even from across the street you can see how white and pasty her skin is, her thick and naked shoulders sloping beneath greasy straggles of dark hair. Modesty isn’t her virtue, obviously, and you watch, half-fascinated, half-repulsed, as her breasts squash against the window.

A vivid red grin, the only true color about her, splits her face when she realizes that you notice her.

“Do you … see that?” you ask Stavros, and point.

But even as you ignore her frantic overtures for you to come up, come up and join her, you have the feeling that just as this invitation is for you alone, so is the sight itself.

“See what?” he says.

“I…” You shake your head. “I should be getting on to work,” and when you’re halfway down the block curiosity gets the better of you, and you turn around to see her waving goodbye — or at least until next time.

*

The skin condition begins like a common rash, spreading and intensifying from there, from scalp to face, down to your neck and shoulders and chest, your back and arms. A great portion of your waking hours are simply spent scratching an itch that never feels sated, and within days you can scarcely bear to pass before a mirror. Scaly red patches, some crusty from too much scratching … you don’t wear them well, but then who does?

The dermatologist diagnoses psoriasis. What’s causing it, you want to know.
Why?
Together you rule out food allergies, various environmental irritants to which you may have exposed yourself. You’ve not changed these sorts of routines in quite some time.

“Of course,” says the doctor, “we can’t overlook an emotional component to this outbreak.”

Swell. You’re not even supposed to grieve properly?

Treatments begin, oral dosages of etretinate and sessions of outpatient ultrasound hyperthermia, but you don’t seem to make any improvement. To the contrary, you seem to be getting worse. It gets to the point where your boss thinks it would be a fine idea if you’d take sick leave. You’re not the only one relieved. This is welcomed by an entire office full of people to whom you must be becoming terribly aberrant. And at whom you’ve been increasingly tempted to scream, “None of you knows just how lucky you are, not a single complacent one of you!”

Stavros is the only one who doesn’t mind your appearance, but you’re wearing a hat pulled low these days, with your coat collar turned up, and bandages whenever your busy fingernails have left your face oozing. Camouflage has become a vital skill.

“No improvements,” he says, not quite a question, seeming to mourn for you.

You shake your head, wondering with shame who’s staring and who’s averting their eyes. When you’re not occupied with this you usually glance at the window where the strangely repellent woman waved to you. Although as far as repellent goes, you definitely feel a new sympathy toward her. You didn’t know what repellent was then.

You think maybe you’ve seen her since, grinning from other windows, other doorways, catching your eye, then disappearing, as if teasing you. But there’s a certain innocence in teasing, and hers was lost long ago, if ever she possessed any at all.

Luring you, then? That’s more like it.

“If your doctors do you no good,” says Stavros, gritting that mouthful of brownish ivory, “then maybe you should go to another kind of doctor.”

“A second opinion,” you murmur. You’re reminded of an old joke.
You want a second opinion? Okay: You’re ugly, too.
“I don’t know any other kinds of doctors.”

And from the way Stavros smiles, you know he’s about to make one of his stranger pronouncements.

*

You’re not the type who would ordinarily frequent those who don’t hang M.D. shingles from their walls, but, relieved of your office duties, you have all this extra time. And Stavros speaks so glowingly of her, and she does live in his building, so you don’t have much of an excuse.

Ellen Medicine Crow is her name. Her father, Stavros told you, as a boy was given tutelage by the legendary Black Elk, although you’re not sure if you believe this. Quacks never stop seeking ways to boost their own stock.

“A shaman,” you say upon first encountering her. The irony isn’t lost on you. If your rationalist friends could see you now.

“I prefer healer,” she tells you. “It doesn’t sound quite as presumptuous. Or as intimidating.”

Intimidating. She’s that already, this Lakota woman. She must be near fifty, if not past it, but carries herself tall and strong and supple in a way that’s agelessly youthful. The only giveaway is the crinkles around her eyes. Her hair reaches her waist, black but threaded with strands of gray. Ellen Medicine Crow inspires your first sexual thoughts since
she
died, which frighten you with their suddenness, their power.

It’s no easier when you learn she wants to come stay with you for a few days. There’s so much she has to learn about you before she can help —
if
she can, she adds, which is the main reason you give in. You rather like the honesty of this kind of medicine, of someone who, unlike your usual physician, may be perfectly willing to declare your case a lost cause.

It feels strange having a woman around again, although her presence is hardly like that of a roommate; rather, a bird or some other creature that watches you with bright, all-seeing eyes. At night she sleeps by your side, although there’s no touching but for accidental brushes. You turn away whenever an erection raises, yet feel sure she must know what you’re thinking; too, she surely notices your shame over such traitorous skin, but has the grace to pretend she doesn’t.

You distract yourself some of the time with the photo albums that accumulated before the hurled brick changed everything. Page after page of memories, some fresh, some seasoned by years, all of them capable of bringing you to tears if you look at them just right.

Ellen Medicine Crow lingers behind you as you bow your head at the table, weeping, and you feel her bend lower. Feel the light touch of her hands on your shoulders, the press of her forehead at the back of your neck. She’s just sharing in your grief, but you drink in her touch with a terrible fear you’ll never know anything so tender again.

Perhaps she knows this too, and this is why she mourns.

“Why did you decide to become a healer?” you ask her later, with a drier face.

Hair shimmers as she shakes her head. “I didn’t decide. I had nothing to do with it. It decided for me. The most I ever did was choose not to fight it.”

“Suppose you wanted something else, that this wasn’t what you wanted to do. Wouldn’t you have fought it then?”

She’s patient with your honest skepticism, has undoubtedly encountered it before. “But how could I? The universe creates what it needs. All I had to do was grow. There’s no reason to make it all so difficult.”

You laugh, not cruelly. Mostly you wonder why you had to turn out so enlightened. “I just can’t buy into that,” you say, but no more. This hardly seems the time to get yourself into a reasoned argument against determinism.

Although you can see the appeal: The illusion of hands moving behind the scenes; accountability; someone or something to blame for the wretched turns life takes in this fucked-over world…

And you’re angrier than you have any right to be, aren’t you?

On the third day Ellen sends you out on an errand, something you must do by yourself.
Go find a rock and bring it back,
these are her instructions.
At least the size of your fist, a rock you feel compelled to pick up more than any other rock.

You’ve never given rocks much thought before, wanting only to duck them when they’re thrown, but she’s the healer. You find one a few blocks away — it’s a tougher order to fill in the city than you might think — half-buried in a nest of weeds beside a stagnant ditch. It passes Ellen’s approval and she has the two of you sit on the floor, facing each other. Her face is serious, clouded even, her focus upon you total. You are the world. And you are in trouble.

“It’s more than just your skin,” she says. “It’s everything, everyone you lose and everything that breaks for you. You wonder why. Why it happens to you. Don’t you?”

You shake your head. “I already told you, I don’t believe— “

“Lie to yourself if you want, but don’t lie to me.”

Your head lowers a bit. And you suppose, possibly, you may at least entertain the sometimes notion of believing in reasons, that coincidence stretches only so far. You nod miserably, wondering if Galileo felt this way, forced to recant.

“Then ask the rock.”

You stare at her. “Ask … the
rock
?”

“Ask the rock, then stare at it. Stare into it, so that you see more than just its surface. Wait until you see the patterns and the shapes it shows you. When you see something … tell me what it is.” She takes pity on your failure to grasp any purpose here whatsoever. “The rock will tell you what you already know, but cannot or will not admit to yourself yet.”