The End (31 page)

Picture a seascape, he said. Now picture the sky over this sea. In the deep distance it becomes difficult to tell the sky and the sea apart. There is a thin strip at the horizon, a middle space, a third space, where the other two realms appear mixed-up. This is the Thomist view of what a person is; a person is what happens when the material (the sea) and the spiritual (the sky) intersect.

Well and good, Ciccio thought. From the shore it was often difficult to say where sky ended and water began. But what did it mean that he knew that in fact the sky and the surface of the water
did not
meet, that it was just an illusion that they met? It implied that a person was either material or spiritual or neither. Sorry. It made no sense.

They were killing him with work. He didn’t know what they were trying to turn him into. But he didn’t know what he was, either.

March. There was the smell on the air of mud drying, of the everywhere mud of late winter drying up at last. What was the smell like? It was like the faint, bitter odor of a bin of roofing nails.

Young Mazzone was on his way to school, briskly, wide-strided, on the cusp of running. He was on the cusp of running because he had the blues, and the SJs were making him over in their image, and when they had the blues they took long walks at high speeds to purge the blood of base fluids. He was hopping a little as he went. He was the merest bit out of breath, which was good.

His route downtown, Saint Ambrose Boulevard, was the straightest shot west from Elephant Park, but it was only sporadically paral leled by proper sidewalks. Most of the way he had to toe the curb or else slop through the mud alongside, where road salt had destroyed the grass. The cleaner route took half again as long. A streetcar jangled down the median. The boulevard was asphalt in the outer lanes, brick in the inner, and gravel down the middle, where the tracks ran. Where houses remained, they were fantastic multicolored ruins with porch-roof posts that no longer reached the sagging porches, with windows busted in, each one, for sport, with scoliotic chimneys, with doorways missing the doors or boarded up, with trim that had once (you could see through the peeling white) been painted three or four carefully patterned pastel tints. Gargoyles instead of aluminum downspouts drained the gutters and spoke of the kind of money he was pretty sure didn’t exist anymore. The houses did not, any of them, show the first sign of sentient life. Dark vines with showy pink buds grew up the walls and into the windows. Terra-cotta roof tiles dappled the gardens. It was a village of gingerbread houses someone had left outside to be tramped by the dog, to be eaten by raccoons, or to go to pudding in the rain.

Farther on, the boulevard veered north along the lip of a sandstone quarry and through a huddle of unpainted shanties where the Syrians had used to live; and then some colored people had lived there, but recently they had moved away, too. Then the road cut through a meadow that you could see had, years ago, been farmed—the earth was leveled out and there was a rock wall to one side where someone had piled the glacial debris. Sugar maples and scrub sumacs hemmed the meadow in, plotting its overthrow. A beech sapling grew straight out of the top of the wall.

Then, past the meadow—he checked his pulse, he sped up—the rail line forked to the south, and nearly all the auto traffic merged onto the new U.S. highway, and the road narrowed to two brick lanes.

After a hundred yards, it emerged on the lip of a great, sloping cliff.

And he had to stop here—how could he not stop here, daily, the scene sort of inflicting itself on him? Four hundred million years ago, the place where he stood was a seabed covered with a sheet of mud. The mud hardened, was covered with new mud that hardened, and so on, and became, by the time the sea receded, a vast cache of wafer-thin layers of shale beneath the surface. Then recently the river had cut it open, and then a glacier had followed the river’s path and widened the gap into a broad valley walled off by the cliff. Below him, the brittle black shale lay sloppily stacked, like an enormous palisade of burned newspapers. And he could see this mud-colored river down in the valley, convolving from the southern woods into the open plain beneath the cliff, where the vast, decaying, ash-bedecked, enchanted city arrayed itself, alive and sulfur smelling, this city, his home.

He kept on walking to the school. None of the trees down here were in bloom. The shortest route into the valley was a one-way cobblestone street called Reckless Avenue. He descended the cliff at top speed. His feet were wheels.

A mist rose from the city, a slow exhalation from a great dying animal.

The yellowish morning air browned as he approached the blast furnaces on the flats, down at the bottom of the shale valley walls, and he was trying to train himself to notice things like this, perversities, that the air itself was a sort of military-uniform color, khaki, you called it. He’d discovered the color of city air on the farm, perversely, where the air was colorless. He had trouble seeing what was right in front of him.
Khaki
came from Urdu for “dustlike.”

There were taverns across the street from the mountainous steel mills amid which West Seventh Avenue passed. And depending on what time he went by there he caught either the third-shift men heading mill to bar or the first shift heading bar to mill.

He cut through a brickyard and through a hospital parking lot and through the SJs’ vegetable garden and then was at the school.

Nino and Ricky were waiting for him behind the boiler room.

It was 7:15 in the morning.

Nino, scratching his back on the quoin blocks, said, “Hello, Eminence.”

The matinal meeting of the Gentlemen’s Smoking Society commenced. They had waited for him, which he appreciated.

Nothing important was going to happen today.

He looked at Nino.

Nino had a broad, glum face. His dad was the sergeant at arms of the local to which Ciccio’s father had belonged. He had a twin called Cornflake, or Corny, even by the mother, supposedly. This twin lived in a state home for retarded children, where he was visited twice weekly by his mother and brothers but not by the father. Ciccio had never seen the twin. He suspected the twin was a hoax, only Nino’s was a face you thought incapable of lying. There was a theme in its construction—the eye placement that was a fraction of an inch too far toward the temples, the sharply protruding jaw, the downward point of the corners of his mouth—the theme being that he had the face of a big, guileless trout. Ciccio hadn’t seen this before just now.

He looked at Ricky. He didn’t know what Ricky looked like. He was looking right at Ricky and couldn’t see anything other than brown hair, blue blazer, dandruff on the blazer. How long had he known Ricky, and he couldn’t say what he looked like?

He was trying to notice perversities. It wasn’t hard. They were everywhere. Grotesqueries. He had recently approached the bathroom mirror, tape measure in hand, in the coolest scientific spirit, unsuspecting he would find anything definitive but needing a control sample for his research into the grotesque. And he’d found, mirabile visu, and not without a certain prideful shock, that his own features were crookedly affixed to his face, that that was what was the matter with it. And he had not been aware. And he imagined that real manhood, freedom, would mean that all these mysteries that he couldn’t see were mysteries because they were too close to him would reveal themselves. He would be permitted to see what had from the start been hiding right out here in the open.

They finished their cigarettes and went on into the school.

Then it was April.

Then it was May.

He needed something to happen, but that was irrelevant, his need was irrelevant. It was imperative that something should happen. No, it was manifest that something was going to happen. A substance was being held in a provisional vessel, and the vessel wanted to burst. He had been reading in the hope of dissolving himself in the substance so that once the vessel burst he’d be carried away with the rest.

He was made to write a paper on Aristotle’s definition of motion. The definition was that motion, or change, was the coming into actuality of a potential insofar as it was a potential. He had gotten a grade of C-minus on the paper because he skipped the
insofar as
clause because he hadn’t understood it.

Father Manfred had scribbled a pencil note on the bottom of the last page referring him to the end of book iii, chapter 1, of the
Physics,
where he could find an example of what the
insofar as
clause was about. He was to be prepared to defend his understanding of the example for his oral examination that spring.

The exam took place in the courtyard between the laboratory classrooms and the SJs’ greenhouse. You had to go through the greenhouse to get to the courtyard. When you got to the courtyard, you found two canvas folding lawn chairs under a tree and Father Manfred in one of them, awaiting you. He had a pitcher of fruit punch on the grass and a stack of paper cups. Yellow jackets were dive-bombing the fruit punch, and while Ciccio talked, the priest was fishing them out, crushing them between his fingertips, and dropping them into a pocket in the skirt of his cassock.

The example of a potential that Ciccio had to explain was “building material”; a block, let’s say. When you were building something with it, it was in motion because you were bringing into actuality its potential to build. But, Ciccio said, if you were, say, throwing the block at a pear tree to knock down a pear, you couldn’t describe it as having anything to do with building; you could say the block was in motion as projectile, maybe, because you were actualizing its potential as projectable. Then he interrupted himself.

“Whenever I think I’m getting him,” Ciccio said, “him, Aristotle, right away I says to myself, That can’t be right, that’s so—what’s the word—dumb, how could it be worth his trouble to say it?”

Father Manfred said, “No, but you’re right. This is how Aristotle feels. He is observation. He has a bottom. Saint Paul also has a bottom. Now, if I were to tell you that whenever I found myself believing I understood Philosopher X, I felt a pang of dread, I knew I was about to be plunged into deeper unknowing because the teaching of Philosopher X is bottomless, then I am describing whom?”

“Plato,” Ciccio said.

“Yes, and?”

“Jesus Christ our Lord.”

“Yes, and?”

Ciccio picked at a mole that had recently come to light on his chin. “You want me to say Kierkegaard,” he said.

“All right, but you were saying. You were going somewhere.”

He tried again, but he got tangled up in the
insofar as
clause and smacked himself on his mouth.

The priest said, “Paraphrase using a different example and without using the words
potential
or
actual.
”

Ciccio said, “There’s a man in prison. He dreams of escaping—colorful dreams, where the authorities are chasing him. Then he wakes up. He busts the lock and starts to escape, but it isn’t like the dream at all. No dogs are after him. No sirens. The guards are asleep. He’s escaping, but not insofar as he dreamt of escaping.” He added, more to himself than to the old man, “So, like a dope, he turns around and locks himself back up again.”

“I don’t follow,” said the priest absently, rattling the mucus in his throat. He looked aside. In their pink and swollen orbits, his eyes floundered, tracing the path of a zigzagging object that Ciccio couldn’t see.

“When the prisoner becomes free, he can’t dream of being free anymore,” he said. “Like as in, the dream exists only in dreaming it.”

“Little blackguard thought he could sting me!” said the priest.

One of the yellow jackets had just landed on the back of his neck, where it met its death.

“You’re going to have to repeat that. I beg your pardon. I had distracted myself,” he said.

Ciccio repeated himself.

Father Manfred said, “The attaining of the object of the quest always disappoints, you’re saying.” He made a grandly sarcastic fake yawn.

“I mean,” Ciccio said, “I might say to myself common-sensically, I long for what I long for. But, you know, the thing you longed for is never what you advertised. Obviously. And why is that? Maybe because you’d rather long for it than get it. Which is stupid.”

“You’re saying there’s something the matter with the sentence, ‘A potential is actualized,’ because the subject of the sentence can’t be what you say it is and also do what you say it does at the same time.”

“Okay, then, that’s what I’m saying.”

“Okay, but this is not at the same time. This is motion. This is change. There are miles per hour. Time is elapsing.”

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“I’m not trying to be rough with you, boy, but isn’t that too bad? Aristotle is not your enemy, motion is your enemy.”

“What are you saying, Father? I like motion.” In the space between them, Ciccio erratically waved his hand.

“All of this fills you with a terrific sense of misgiving, but you don’t know about what you have this misgiving. Tell me what you feel at the edge of your brain.”

He looked at the priest. One of the eyes appeared to be dead, but Ciccio couldn’t tell which one.

“What I feel at the edge of my brain, as in, I don’t know if I even agree with what I’m about to say—”

“Yes,” the priest said.

“—is bogus.”

“Good.”

“I feel trapped in bogusness. Every time I say to myself, Oh, look, that’s real, that over there—it turns out that it isn’t real, I just had an idea of a realness. But ideas aren’t real. Ideas are just ideas. I feel, what, double-crossed by my mind. The more I think, the more bogus everything becomes.”

“Which everything?”

“Everything. What I see, what I hope for, what I suspect.”

He looked around himself. The sky was green with twilight. There was a very fine drizzle. The tree hanging over them—he knew what it was called, it was a black locust—was dropping hundreds of tiny white blossoms onto the shoulders and the lap of the priest, who noticed this and was bemused. He plucked a few of the yellow-jacket carcasses out of his pocket and bounced them idly with some of the locust petals in the lap of his skirt. It had to be the colors he was looking at, the severity of the contrast between the deeply white flowers, his deeply black garment, and the deeply yellow and glossy stripes encircling the thorax of each lifeless wasp. Every Ohio schoolboy knows you do not call this thing a bee, you call it a wasp. The priest was clean shaven. He had the exploded capillaries at the tip of the bulbous nose that you associate with drunks.