2-28-06, 2:00 pm
A car horn sounded a few blocks away and seemed to linger a moment in the humid night air. As if out of no where, a weather-beaten low rider rounded the corner with a screech and fishtailed out of sight down a dark side street, leaving behind a trail of exhaust. In the obscurity, the cloud of dust and smoke dissipated into an eerie haze, floating mistily upward in pooling cones of light which poured from the hooded silhouettes of street lights. There was no trace of a breeze and it was as if the lamps themselves were drawing a breath. The leaves were still and green, yet in the summer darkness, the trees seemed somehow blacker than the night. From doorways and porches, dripped the murmur of anonymous voices, intruding into the thick stillness. The persistent hum of insects, the distant laughter of children, an occasional yell or whistle, all padded the emptiness. It was easy to feel alone.
The dry, flat sound of strappy sandals, clapping rhythmically on the pavement reverberated in her ears with a hypnotizing regularity as Cira made her way along the cracked, uneven sidewalk in the gathering darkness. She evaded the seduction of importuning promises exuding from empty doorways as she passed. Rows of dilapidated houses beckoned to her with an imploring silence. From a few lighted windows fell bits and phrases of people’s lives – familiar, yet tentative, enigmatic. But Cira felt no desire to accept these intoxicating entreaties, to enter in upon these worlds. She had lived through each of these scenes innumerable times, if only in her mind’s eye, and without a pause or a thought, she knew how each began and how each would end. It didn’t really matter, she thought. It was always the same anyway. Day after day, night after night, week after week. There was no perceivable beginning. No end…only the continuous echo of her footsteps pounding along on the cement.
Life had always been just as it was under the glare of the street lights that night. Ahead in her apartment, the once-white, dirt-streaked walls yellowed and grew darker with each passing year. Yet, underneath they were the same bleak, barren walls that swallowed up the detritus of shattered dreams, only to breed nightmarish cockroaches and rats from forgotten corners. There always seemed to be a strong-smelling, sullen man with a glazed stare and more than a hint of stubble growth sitting in front of the television, morosely mesmerized by the incessant drone of afternoon game shows or reality TV. Belly protruding in an unhealthy mound over the straining edge of his belt, he would guzzle the warm dregs of a Miller Lite and squeeze the can with one hand until it crushed in upon itself with hollow, rasping groans. As the can clattered to the floor, he would emit a moist-sounding belch into the already sour-smelling air, where it mingled with the unrelenting, stale odor of cigarettes.
At night, there was always a man behind the closed door to her mother’s room. It had always been so. When Cira was younger, she would try to escape the ugly significance of the dull sounds which made their way to her ears from behind the cheap, wooden barrier by turning up the sound on the television. She would watch in the dark while the staccato flickering light leapt into the room, dancing on the walls and in the shadowy corners of the apartment. Her eyes were abstract reflections of the movement on the screen. Those chameleon eyes, feigning blindness and death, shone with a brilliant blankness as a few noises from the street below managed to pierce the exaggerated, canned laughter pretending to fill the room.
Of course, the man who belched at Jeopardy and the man behind the door were not necessarily the same man. And the man who sat before the TV one day was not the same one who had been there a year before or even a few months earlier. But the faces changed so often that to Cira, it no longer mattered that one differed from the next. They were all the same to her. Her eyes, all too familiar with chameleon virtues, regarded the procession of men as one faceless man, with ever-mutable features. And within the undulating parade of faceless faces, Cira perceived the monumental monotony of their lives.
But her mother seemed to need these men. She basked in their fawning, if brief, attentions with a facade of self-importance. Cira and her needs were never at issue. Her mother was like some aloof stranger with whom Cira just happened to share an apartment. The affection she so desperately wanted from her mother was ostentatiously lavished on her “fellows” in self-aggrandizing displays of ardor worthy of a silent film star. Cira was never the honored recipient. Motherly virtue had absented itself. But as Cira grew older, she began to understand her mother’s reticence to forge genuine relationships. Acknowledging emotional connections, even to her daughter, would expose vulnerability, weaken the fortress of experience-hardened grit that kept the world at bay. In fact, Cira, herself, had now begun to cultivate these same attributes.
Cira clutched her purse as she rounded the corner. Suddenly, looming above her in silent tribute to the triumph of human ingenuity over the recalcitrance of nature, was an urban apartment complex. In a bath of shadow and light, a series of huge, monstrous structures now rose above the 19th century row houses she had passed on neighboring streets. The trees flanking the older houses came to an abrupt end at the foot of the behemoth. Blacktop, chain-link fence, cement and brick – the vegetation of an urban jungle – engulfed the remainders of once aesthetic, Victorian yards. From a distance, the textured red brick surface gave the illusion of a jewel-studded mosaic, sparkling in the harsh, yellow glare. The stark ugliness of the buildings was briefly transformed by the luminous quality of the night. But Cira was not to be fooled. Beneath the glittering disguise was the austere reality of her life there. As she drew nearer, the lying masquerade dissolved into an orgy of cigarette butts, graffiti and filth. Cira looked away. More real was the movement of her thin, tanned legs in opposition as her steps plodded onward toward the entrance.
At 13, Cira had already developed into one of those women who unwittingly elicit licentious, caressing stares. Possibly her seeming obliviousness to her own charms both enhanced the pleasure experienced by her would-be admirers and allowed them to feel the liberty to peruse freely. It had not taken long for her mother’s devotees to make note. The reflection of death that her child’s eyes had assumed those nights in front of the TV became a more permanent state as she came to know the rough, eager hands that pawed her. Heavy, rancid, beer-tainted breath would overwhelm her before the thick, coarse tongues that tasted of old cigarettes forced their way between her lips and moved on, leaving a cold, slimy trail that led down the side of her neck.
But Cira had pretended that none of it was real. She saw those men and experienced their gropes with the same chameleon eyes that had provided her refuge, forever, or so it seemed. Her mother’s voice continued to have the same demanding, unfeeling quality it always had possessed, yet Cira knew that awareness had been born. Although those clandestine, skulking encounters remained unutterable secrets, everything between them, every trivial interaction, had taken on exaggerated significance and generated heightened levels of tension. And still, the faceless, nameless men proceeded in their lives as if nothing had changed. Cira guessed that nothing had really. What did it matter whether it was a drunken, wrinkled, balding man, or a young, cocky street jerk? When they touched her, or when she knew that her mother apparently let them touch her, she hated them. They all melded into one great contemptible beast, and in her dreams, she cast them, mother and all, into a yawning abyss. None of them were any different. She cared about none of them, and her life dragged on through the labor of time.
As always, many of the windows that stared out from the height of the apartment complex were scarred by bullet holes and cracks that stretched into web-like patterns on the dusty panes. Cardboard had been used to patch some of the worst spots, behind which draped makeshift curtains – a thin veil separating the sadness outside from the despair within. A few displayed tidy conscientiousness, but even in those, the material was old and worn. Although the wind was a stranger in those months, most of the windows were left open to entice the torrid night air to enter – an invitation that the heavy humidity rarely ventured to accept.
Often, just before entering the empty stairwell that led up to their third floor apartment, Cira would stop and glance upward. The patchwork of windows alternated randomly from darkness, to the inevitable fluttering glow of TV images playing upon the walls and curtains, to illuminations of real life and its dramas. The janused interplay was one between escape into the oblivion of passive viewer, and the drudgery of continued conscious existence – mere chimera, all.
Cira was always filled with a bit of wonder to see a few stars managing to sparkle out of the black void above the ugly red brick, despite the blaze of city lights from below. They produced in her a calm that she little understood, but enjoyed experiencing. Of course, stars endure the sweep of history, and to Cira, they seemed immutable and constant. They were free from the oppressive tedium that she had always felt with the slow passage of time. If only she had known that some of those stars to which she looked for comfort had long since burnt out and died an unknown, solitary death in the vast loneliness of the universe, leaving only ghosts of light to travel over the years and the distances. Perhaps then she would have focused more on the potentialities in her own life to overcome limitations and fatalities in the present – or perhaps she would only have been drawn further toward embracing nothingness, an end to her repetitious existence, toward the smoldering ash from the fire that was merely a snuffed-out star.
That night, the stars seemed to be calling out to her more urgently than usual. The silent shriek from the vast depths of the sky was, however, nothing more than an echo of something she felt welling-up within her. Inside her was a tiny new light which had unexpectedly implanted itself in the sinews and cavities of her being. The creature that she knew was hiding and growing there, deriving sustenance from her, giving her hope, draining from her the last vestiges of strength, was rapidly expanding to fill the soft folds of her woman’s body. But she herself had yet to experience the lovely tranquility of childhood and its curiosities. Her life had been hard and after only 13 years, she already felt spent and exhausted. As she walked along, she could hear the blood pounding in her ears – the same blood that was now coursing through her body, sharing and sustaining that other life.
She had known it was there for some time, but had only confirmed her suspicions that evening. A formal acknowledgement had, for some reason, made it seem more unreal, as if it were happening to someone else while she watched from a distance. When she left the clinic, she had moved along in a dream-like state, feeling more alone than ever. Yet, there was the strange, new knowledge deceptively undermining her solitude. Enticing and beguiling was the feeling of belonging to someone, of someone belonging to her. It made her heart leap, if only a little. She would be a mother. Someone would be her child. Life would no longer be just the same.
But almost as soon as this hope drew shape, it was overshadowed by the dark realization that this new life would be no different than her own had been. For her child, life would be the same monotonous sadness that she had always known. There was nothing to suggest that in having each other, they would be able to escape the apparent inevitability of life in the dank apartment complex. And with this understanding, came an even darker thought – she must not give birth to another life as miserable as her own. She decided almost as soon as she had been touched by those rays of hope, that she would have to extinguish the light that had unexpectedly begun to illuminate her soul, that had so unexpectedly offered a spark of unattainable happiness in the future.
And for this, even more than for the dirty, sweaty, humiliating and vapid encounters, even more than for the nights spent imagining what was going on behind the wooden door, even more than for the years of yearning for motherly caresses, she hated them all. The faceless men, her mother with her perpetually emotionless voice—she wished nothing more than that they would simply cease to exist. She dreamed of being left completely and utterly alone to bask in the warmth of icy solitude. But wishing and dreaming were empty and meaningless endeavors that had long since betrayed her. She knew, beyond hope, that the others would still be there when she eventually reached the apartment.
A rush of warm air escaped through her nostrils in the form of an undefined sigh. She sighed for nothing; she sighed for it all. Turning away from the immensity of the universe above and returning to the finite tangibility awaiting her, Cira’s footsteps entered into the glass and metal doorway of the apartment building. The sound of her sandals against the metal stairs resonated with a ring that was noticeably different from the sound produced on the sidewalk and on the cement hallways of the building. But as she climbed the three stories to the apartment, Cira failed to notice the interesting acoustical contrast. Her gait maintained the same controlled, yet languid pace, and the rhythm continued unabated.
As always, when Cira entered the room, she was greeted by the disorder and ugliness that surrounded her. Out of the corner of her eye, she was aware of the numerous black-bodied splotches that scurried for cover when she switched on the light. Tonight the enveloping humidity seemed more oppressive than usual, and there was a bitter stench about the place that made her crinkle her nose and turn her head in disgust, as if by not meeting it head-on, one could evade its unpleasant reception. Tossing her keys onto the table, pockmarked with cigarette burns, scratches, and sticky rings, Cira glanced from the closed door of her mother’s room to the empty beer cans that littered the floor. In the semi-shadow offered by the overstuffed TV chair, a mangled can lay on its side. The remains had drained into a mirrored puddle that was slowly oozing and spreading over the dirty, cracked linoleum.
Setting her purse on the table with a dull thud, she thrust her hand inside and extracted an almost spent pack of Marlboro’s. She had to rummage a bit through the contents until her fingers lit upon the green, plastic body of her lighter. The purse had been a gift from her aunt for Christmas two years earlier and she had gotten good use out of it. It’s tawny faux leather resisted the visible signs of everyday use. Always practical, her aunt had chosen a purse with the capacity to carry a great deal. Tonight, a dark, heavy object had mysteriously found its way inside. But when Cira reached in to search for her lighter, she had only to push this aside.
Rather unconsciously, Cira lit up one of the three remaining cigarettes in the pack and savored a long, deep drag, exhaling slowly through her nose. For a moment she stared absently at the smoldering tip and thought of the stars outside in the night sky. Swinging one of the kitchen chairs around to face the closed wooden door, Cira sat decisively onto the brittle plastic seat from which tufts of dirty cotton had erupted from ragged cracks. Her feet remained firmly on either side of the chair as if to brace herself. With her free hand, she thrust the lighter back into her purse. Letting her arm rest on the table, her hand remained hidden by the opening of the faux fabric bag. With the other hand, she continued the sporadic, habitual motions of smoking. Yet, now her attention was fixed squarely on the door, waiting.
The summer heat was sweltering, soporific. It could have been midday, if it were not for the darkness, which penetrated into her thoughts as she waited. Tiny beads of sweat had begun to appear on her upper lip and a shiny path had formed down her left cheek, as tears of sweat made their way down her smooth, tanned forehead. Every few minutes, a small drop would roll down the path, either to fling itself onto the shoulder of her blouse, or to gather with its precursors below her ear and run off slowly to be absorbed by the already damp collar at her neck.
Smoke from her cigarette curled upward and dissolved into an amorphous presence that hung anxiously in the stuffy room. Unnoticed, tails of powdery, gray-white ash broke loose and fluttered silently to the floor. Cira took one last puff, momentarily intensifing the red glow at the tip, as if it were being infused with a jolt of electricity. Then, into the midst of an already overflowing pink plastic ashtray, Cira plunged the tiny red light and pounded it out among butts and singed ends of partially smoked joints: one less light to shine out from the night. As she sat and waited, moments drooled by, slowly and dark like molasses. Who can say whether minutes or hours passed? Cira endured the weight of the lugubrious passage of time, that always strives for the future but never achieves anything except the present. Who knew what the future would bring? She waited without anticipation and was conscious of living only for that future. In fact, she felt herself inexorably bound to the path destiny had carved for her. She was frightfully aware that the future was as much determined by the past as by the present.
Suddenly, a thin band of light appeared from the crack beneath the door and she heard the low, garbled voices that she had known would eventually hatch from the intrepid quiet abandon of the apartment. Cira clutched the cold, dark object laying heavily in wait in the viscera of her bag. With a creak, the door opened and empty words and laughter spewed forth. Cira stiffened and her hand contracted imperceptibly, producing a barely audible click, whose meaning was lost in the muffled confines of faux material. The outer room was flooded by light from the recently opened door and silhouettes of two phantasmagoric figures emerged into her view. Slowly, as if drifting on a current of tepid air, Cira’s hand withdrew from the purse. In the shadowy dampness, the faux phantoms were unable to adjust their eyes enough to discern the black metal shape Cira held firmly in front of her. In their pursuit of exit from the room, they expected to ignore her presence, as was their wont. As fortune would have it, however, this was not now to be the case.
There was an eternity in which no one seemed to move and nothing actually happened. For Cira, that was how life had always been and she felt nothing unusual or out of the ordinary as this instance hung in the balance. She lived in a state of perpetuality in which things were always unbearably constant, and nothing ever changed or broke in upon the density of time. It is difficult to say whether her breathing gave away some hint of anxiety. She respired only once, if that, before the eternity of the moment was played out. If she had been allowed to continue, it is possible to imagine that her breathing pattern would have quickened. But like the death of a star, her breathing went unnoticed. In the wake of the loud, sharp, metallic noise that shattered the melancholy silence, all else became secondary.
In the glare from the doorway, the male figure jerked and fell, slowly reeling with magical circular motions into a dead heap on the floor. The immediate silence that followed the loudness was grating. That silence, however, was instantly broken by the ear-piercing, exaggeratedly passionate and human voice of her mother, carrying into the night air like the waves from a child’s boat on the surface of a pond. Over and over, it seemed, Cira saw her mother’s fear-stricken face contract into the grimace of a blood-curdling scream. Somehow that scream had the quality of seeming to be constantly beginning, although at the same time, it hung in the air as if it would never cease until its last echos were lost into the darkened corners of the room or of Cira’s mind.
The pile on the floor was featureless beneath the splatter of blood that decorated what should have been a face. One of the faceless men. Warm, scarlet syrup dribbled out onto the linoleum in rivers which drained into the pool of warm beer by the TV. The mixture faded into a disgusting burnished orange that glistened in the light spilling out from her mother’s room. In it, was reflected the dark outline of her mother, who stood in the doorway by the heap on the floor, still screaming.
It is a dream, thought Cira, as the heavy metal object fell from her hand and clattered to the floor with much more force than those crushed, empty beer cans had ever produced. In the distance, a shrill siren sang out and on the opposite side of the door, she could hear banging and pounding and loud, distraught voices. But inside the apartment nothing seemed to change. Her mother was as if frozen into an infinite parody of a scream, and life continued for Cira in slow motion. It occurred to her, strangely, that it was much more controllable that way.
Cira’s camouflage eyes were wide and empty. She sank back onto the dingy, cracked, tufty chair. She hugged her stomach and began to rock methodically back and forth, as if in a trance. She imagined that she could feel the warmth of the light that continued to burn inside her belly. She convinced herself of the sensation that she could feel it growing and wondered wistfully, if when they put out that little light, a rose-colored pool would bathe the white of the sheets and the shining, sterile metal instruments, like the expanding stain rapidly engulfing the space around the faceless figure.
As the excited pounding on the door and in her head increased, Cira felt the oppressive foreboding that had been pursuing her all evening, if not forever, disintegrate into the night. From the open window, oblivious stars twinkled in the sky like beautiful sequins. With reality squeezing in upon her, and with her breath now coming in short, shallow spasms, she focused her concentration upon the exquisite resplendence of the brightest star in the square opening of the window. Her eyes deceptively appeared to watch that star, giving her furtive inner self an opportunity to escape, entrenching itself deeper and deeper in the safeholds of the mind. Her swaying continued. Then, in one split second, that point of light her eyes had been focused on outside in the sky unexpectedly disappeared. One minute it was there, sparkling. The next it was gone. Unknowingly, she had witnessed a moment from the past as it manifested its fatality in the present – the long-delayed realization of the death of a star. It had flickered and gone out as easily as a candle in the breeze. And it was then that she knew.
Time erupted. The door burst open. Her mother rushed forward, released from the transfixity of her scream, and Cira felt the whole of the world crumbling around her. Cira turned her face back toward the window and the false permanence of the remaining stars in the sky. Like a child blowing out birthday candles on a cake, she pursed her lips and blew with all of the strength she could muster, hoping to extinguish those lying, charading shimmers in the summer sky in a last, futile effort to exert a modicum of control over the omnipotent forces of the universe. But, even as she did so, she realized what the stars already knew – that the lights of her own future had died long ago and that her life was nothing but an empty shell, a residue of what might have been. She closed her eyes to shut out the irritating glare of reality, and still rocking, she clutched her head between her hands and began to hum with low, broken tones. Salty tears fell to the floor, but were too weak to flow to meet the sticky wetness that eddied by the heap that lay by the can on the floor by the TV.
Outside, everything continued as if before, but now somehow inherently different. The stars flickered, mockingly, tantalizingly. The streetlights beamed, and the indirect flutter of television screen images bobbed in the windows of the ugly red brick behemoth of a building. Overpowering the rest, however, were the revolving, flashing red and blue lights of the ambulance and of the police cars parked haphazardly on the street below, rhapsodically illuminating the underside of life in the apartment complex. But in the stagnant summer darkness, it was impossible to know which lights represented the living rays of hope and which were only fossilized remnant images of lights that had prematurely been extinguished.
