The End (29 page)

When the record of his physical memory picked up again, he was standing in the snow in the vineyard sharpening his spring shears with a rattail file. He heard a clitterclatter in the distance; he looked up and saw his grandmother’s salt-encrusted AMC truck hugging the shoulder of the highway, heading north into town. Where was she off to? Then, at dinner—dinner was bread and boiled winter squash (the physical world had returned to him, with its yellows and slimies)—he asked her what she’d gone to town for. She told him she was sending a wire to his mother. This was on the twenty-ninth of December, 1952, a date that would live in infamy. Everything had already gone to hell, and then the next morning they got a telegram at the farm from his mother saying that she was going to come to the funeral.

How amusing. Well, no, frankly, it wasn’t amusing. His grandmother understood the gist of the telegram, but she made him read it out loud anyway. How was he to interpret that other than as his grandmother saying, “You’re welcome to visit here, kid, but I won’t take you in”?

He was a boy standing on a trapdoor.

His mother wasn’t planning to rent a bed at the YWCA, like any courteous vagrant would do; instead they’d decided without consulting him that she would stay—guess where—in his house, as though it were her house. Hell was getting crowded.

No way his mother thought he’d stay in the house if she was living in it.

They were trying to put him on the street, was what they were trying to do.

There was no will. He was a minor still. His mother would get everything.

He cleaned the house on New Year’s Eve while the old ladies were at the station (Ricky was with him, but Ricky was no help), stopping to touch in parting tribute the brocaded buttons of the seat cushions and the newel where he hung his shoulder pads to air them out after practice. Good-bye, number 123 Twenty-second Street. Hello, the rails.

Ricky went home.

Ciccio was alone in the house, and they were due back any minute, the women. He had to get out. He left a note saying he was at Ricky’s for the night. Assuming they didn’t call to verify, he had a head start of at least twelve hours before whomever they sent looking for him was sent looking (unless their plan had always been to gently suggest he make himself scarce and to send no one after him when he did).

He had nowhere to go. He had aspired to this. He was fifteen and broke and homeless. It felt like he was borrowing a bum’s rags to say he was broke. A kid can’t be broke because a kid isn’t supposed to have any money of his own. You wouldn’t say your dog was broke. But he was going to need to buy food and pay rent and he had no money for these things, so he was legitimately broke.

He had nowhere to go.

How to say: I mean this, this is a fact, this is more than what it feels like? I’ve packed a bag with spare socks and only one set of extra shoes because I don’t know how far I’ll have to carry the bag. But I have nowhere to go with this bag on my back.

There was an invisible membrane between a child’s world and the world of grown people. The child’s was hypothetical; the adult’s was actual. The child’s world was only an image. It had none of the actual machinery that made the actual world go. You didn’t have to have any money. Nobody would put you in jail. Your work was school. You didn’t produce anything real. You produced term papers, the graph of a hyperbola, which were pretend. Therefore the sometimes happiness of work on the farm, in which he felt the pleasing tension of labor that authentically needed to happen. The republic needed grapes for its jelly sandwiches. But he was at the farm only on weekends and school vacations. The farm was ancillary. He was somebody other than himself there. If somebody should ask him what his occupation was, he couldn’t say “farmer.” He was a kid, he was potential, like an egg. When the make-believe-ness of his existence dawned on him, he wanted out. But they wouldn’t let him out until he’d become a nuisance to them, and then they’d forced him out.

It was late and snowing and New Year’s Eve, so there was no hope of a trolley. He set out on foot. He didn’t turn around to see if the house he was walking away from was lost to him yet, behind the snowfall.

How to say: I am out, I have taken on substance, I am not made of mist, I have—in fact—no place to go? Why, now that he was in the actual world, couldn’t he perceive the weight he knew it had? Why did everything feel as hypothetical as before?

A teacher, Father Delano, had accused him of having a Manichean head, which coming from him was a slur, but it was true. Ciccio did his mental business as if the world was composed of two factions warring with each other. He felt them in his heart all the time. Present experience bore this out. The forces of Darkness were galloping over this town, and therefore get out, right? Here he was now, on the corner of Twenty-second and Eleventh Avenue, facing the blank-eyed concrete statue of Columbus that the K of C had erected in front of the basketball court, and there were two ways only to go—up the hill or down the hill. He chose down.

No, up.

He chose up.

He was wearing a black wool cap of his father’s, a flannel scarf, the leather work gloves he used when they pounded posts at the farm, a three-quarter-length wool coat over a raincoat over a school blazer over a thermal undershirt over a T-shirt. He also wore dungarees, thermal underpants, and his clodhopper winter school shoes with galoshes over them.

The K of C had called off the New Year’s Eve fireworks, said a sign slung around the great man’s neck; a storm was predicted. Ciccio saw not a soul on the avenue. The wind at his back pushed him up the hill. He told himself the wind approved of what he was doing, that it was abetting his escape.

Nobody knew where he was going. There was no motion of animal life along the street for as far up the hill as he could see, nor in the trees.

Look at the snow coming down. And you might know all about its formation in the atmosphere, but when you looked up it appeared to come from nowhere, to materialize. Everything was blue, the snow, rooming houses he knew in daylight were red brick. They were the blue of snowfall at night. Something was the matter with the sky. He figured it out. It was lower, it was falling, it was enclosing this place like a lid on a box.

He had to get away.

There was this tremendous snowfall happening, this absolute blanketing, or rather erasure, of the streets. It was irrelevant to notice the swell in the snow under which he knew a fire hydrant was, or to notice any other individual thing. A mystic cataclysm was taking place. Individual physical existence was being wiped out.

He wanted to disappear.

Look, here was the snow materializing ex nihilo, what a word. And he had wanted to feel that happening to him. He’d believed that once he got on the road he’d feel himself taking on substance, becoming a thing instead of an idea. But he didn’t feel that. He didn’t feel heavier, he felt lighter.

He had to ask himself, What was the goal? Was it to become real, to exert force in the physical world, to have money, to be looked at instead of looked around, like people look around children?

Or was it to throw away the mirage of being real? To be looked through, to evanesce?

The snow was materializing out of nothing, and he wanted to do the trick in reverse. He was trudging up the hill, step and another step and another step, the wind pushing on his back.

He wanted to disappear into the trees. He was on top of the hill now, looking back. He wanted to leave no sign of himself. The snow kept falling. He wanted no one to remember having laid eyes on his face.

What happened was probably inevitable.

He made it on foot to the bus depot in Van Buren Heights, a distance of five miles, and fell gratefully to sleep on a bench.

He was not, once he woke up at daybreak, grateful for the wardrobe he was carrying on his body. He was trapped in an amniotic sac of sweat. Someone had turned on the current in the argon lamps overhead. An indigent struggled to topple a cigarette machine in an alcove beside the grated-over ticket window. The green air smelled of urine.

What happened was, he sat up in his sac on the bench and then a luminous angel took shape on his shoulder. The angel pointed out that absenting oneself from Ohio without warning anybody was not an unprecedented stunt and that he’d judged it severely in the past. Also, said the angel, was he really going to let his mother cast herself in the role of the respecter of the dead while he played the dead’s deserter? He was going to have to go back, said the voice of virtue, and sit through the funeral, and announce his intention to leave, and then leave.

The cigarette machine came smashing face-first to the floor. The man stood cursing it. The problem seemed to be penetrating his mind that, even if he’d succeeded in breaking the glass of the face, the cigarettes were now safely entombed under the shell of the machine unless he could lift it back up again. He collapsed onto his knees and began scratching at the sheet metal. It was piteous and difficult both to watch and not to watch. Ciccio saw he was alone with this man, in the depot.

They were indoors but there was no heat.

Then the angel of Darkness appeared on his other shoulder and castigated him. Going back was a dodge, it was an excuse to let the iron cool, the more ineffectually to strike it later on. He would get comfortable, he would lose his nerve, he would betray himself.

The man had pissed himself and was scratching very delicately with his long fingernails at the back of the machine.

Ciccio pushed the depot doors into the snowdrifts and squeezed himself outside. The snow had evidently fallen all night, and it was still falling, although the wind out of the northwest had died off, so he wouldn’t have to face into it. He headed back to the neighborhood and spent the day in getting there.

It was 1953. There was snow inside his socks. With every step, his guardian angel of Darkness abused him. What had taken four hours to walk last night looked like it was going to take fifteen today, and yet his strength was superhuman. He had not eaten and didn’t want to eat.

There was all day through the tedium of the snow-buried streets to examine his shame. He felt it, he was ashamed. He didn’t understand what it was. It wasn’t the kind of shame where you’re worried how others look at you. He felt shame and didn’t know what it was coming from, what purpose it was serving. He had to examine it. It was a warning of some kind. It was his heart warning his will of something. That was as far as he could get with it.

In the last week he had become a grown man. The vapors of grief he may have felt before were being incinerated to power the dynamo of his long, thick, persistent legs.

By the time he’d made it into Eastpark, with two miles still to go, it was night again. The physical extremity of his circumstances started to exert its pressure. He wanted to rest, he wanted to eat something. He’d been on his feet since the previous night, with a break, to sleep on the bench, that was about half his normal sleep allotment with respect to time. He had to rest, he had to eat something. He didn’t know where these things might happen.

He had mushed into and across Eastpark, mostly by way of shortcuts through the woods. There was less snow on the forest floor than in the backyards or the streets—which the plows had yet to scratch—because so much of the snow was still hanging in the trees. He sat down on what looked like an oil drum, in the woods. He needed to sleep. He wondered if he could figure out how to construct an igloo of some kind.

There was a complicated system of living things on the forest floor beneath the snow, many of which things he had formal names for or made-up childhood names for, but most of which he had failed even to notice—and the snow had erased them all. There was nothing to see here but sky, snow, and the bones of the trees. The scene was vast and clear, and he was no part of it. He felt incidental and scared. Some places were better to look away from than to look at.

He would feel better when he knew where he was going.

He had where to go? No place. The usurper would be in his house by now. He asked himself first where in the short run, then where in the long run, he could go. From olden times the death of parents had forced young men into the wilderness to make their keeps. There were still parcels of land open to homesteading in western Canada. It was two a.m., said the bell of the church, the only perceivable evidence of the neighborhood; otherwise the woods seemed to him like the aboriginal Ohio of French and Indian War days. He was trying and failing not to look at this beautiful scene, of which he was not a part and could never be a part. It was silly to look at this place and call it a wilderness when he knew it was a trapezoidal park bordered on all sides by streets, when, furthermore, he knew the names of the streets. A wilderness was by definition wild and unpeopled. This place was fenced off in order to look wild but wasn’t really wild. And he—a person—was, at least materially, in it. He wanted to recede into wilderness, but there was perhaps no wilderness left. There were only places where people were and places where people had not yet gotten around to being. If there was a wilderness anywhere, it was in his mind.

At last the snowfall broke, the moon emerged, and stars. There was no suggestion of wind in the tops of the pines, and he was footsore and starved and numb of face. He gave in. There was a miserably reasonable and boy-souled answer to the question of where he could go in the short run, and he had no choice at this point. He was too cold. He was in retreat. He descended the slope of the woods, out of the frontier, down to Chagrin Avenue, and made a right on Twenty-sixth and stole through Mrs. Marini’s cyclone-cellar doors.

He tiptoed into the cellar guest bedroom, the one no one ever used, with the locked cabinets and the sink. It took him fifteen minutes to undress and hide his clothes under the adjustable hospital bed down there. Then he lay in the bed an hour or two, somehow unsleeping, composing in his thoughts the list of grievances that made it impossible for him to stay there, while his shivering slowly subsided, sensation returned to his toes, and his will to leave took leave of him.