71. Waiting to Escape

If all goes as I intend—I’ve given up planning a long time now—I’ll be away from this block for good tomorrow. Still, it’s a relief, almost, to be here now.

Now I know there’s still at least one place where bricks continue to fade and flake, but the walls they’re in are still standing. Where roof tiles and sides darken with the shade of green copper turns when it’s been left out in the rain. But I know there’s no copper, or any other metal, in those tiles because of the way they curl around their edges and splinter, though they never quite fall apart.

And the people—the ones who still remain—women—are as I expected, though somehow not quite as old. The lady whose name I never knew, still pale and lined but not wrinkled in the way of people who spend their lives in the shadows of their homes. Not much exposure to sunlight—or to rain or wind, either. Her black dress, another ageless but not timeless layer, gathered into neat if not completely symmetrical folds around her waist by some band I can’t see. Just like what she always wore, except that it’s black.

Mrs. Littington, she’s another story. Her jacket sheathes the small mounds of her breasts and falls in a nearly straight line to her hips, which are tucked into pants of the same color, and the same shape, more or less. It makes perfect sense on her, just like the dark hair that reins in the crown of her head and clings in perfectly straight segments that end around her ears and, in the back, just above the collar of her jacket.

It’s not comforting, really, to see her, the lady whose name I never knew, the houses, the yards in shades of gray that end in chainlink fences, a street that ends in a cemetery yard on one end but whose other end cannot be seen fro here. However, I’m glad to see everything here for what I assume to be the last time.

Some people leave the places where they were born and raised because they need to know that not all people look or talk like their family members or neighbors, and that not everybody lives in the same kinds of houses. I learned such things, too, but it wasn’t the reason I left. In fact, if I’d learned otherwise, it might not’ve made any difference to me.

Adam left. The man whose body was found in the basement—and whose autopsy has my former name—is gone. And Louis, whom those other boys in school nearly killed. The other boys, who might’ve killed me if Louis hadn’t been there. All somewhere else, I don’t know where. Now mother’s on her way out. I expect I’ll be, too.

None of this makes any difference, really: This block is still more or less what I left. At least, it feels that way. Which, of course, is enough reason to get out and stay away.

Most of all, I’ve got to get out while it’s still safe, at least relatively, for me to be here. The lady whose name I never knew—She’s squinting in my direction again! Hopefully, I’ll be out of here before she starts talking to me, asking me questions: before I find out she’s recognized me.

70. Forgetting

Probably nobody has ever remembered any event or person, or even object, completely. What I’ve never understood is why anybody tried.

What I understand even less is when people try to make a scene, recollection or piece of furniture seem older and more enshrouded in a gauze of mist than it already is. All those commercials that were shot in grainy black-and-white when film, video and any number of other could reproduce and store the colors paraded in front of them. Why cloud up a clear vision of a day? Why make houses and the things in them seem even more weathered than they actually are?

Mother never talked about the past—hers or anyone else’s. Not even mine. But it seemed that everyone, except her and Adam, who spent more than five minutes with me tried to get me to talk about what was gone, what they could never experience.

Or they tried to wipe out my recall: something they could no more do than to remember their own lives. We’ve all had doctors who told us the needles they stuck in our arms didn’t hurt, or teachers or other adults who told us we weren’t hurt after some bully—or the adult in question—punched, kicked or shoved us.

The result—at least for me—was always the same when any adult condescended or simply lied: contempt, on both sides. Likewise for anyone who tries to blur an already blurry picture. Even the ones who really believe they’re trying to ease my pain, in the end, earn my anger because they’re trying to blunt the edge of my recollections.

By the same token, I don’t try to recall everything, everybody, every moment. Even if I could, I couldn’t keep them, just as I can’t take every article of clothing I’ve ever worn with me. It’s one of the first lessons you learn when you can’t stay some place.

And the moment you begin to move, from necessity, the faces, the voices, the pieces of a house, all disappear into a blur. Or they lie submerged, bubbling through the cauldron of your dreams you don’t remember in the morning.

69. Poverty and Survival

In a town like the one where Vivian grew up, next to the sea, the houses of people—like her father –who’ve seen or will see no other place all have the bleached, splintered look of wood that washed up on the beach in some earlier winter. Even the houses that’ve just been sanded and painted seem like flotsam morphed into fixtures, and that is how you can tell them from the cottages of the people who spend a few weeks out of every year in such a town.

Likewise, true country houses—like the one in the countryside near the Rhine where Adam and some people he’d never seen before or would never see again huddled, curled or flopped through a harsh, endless winter—differ from the retreats of city people. The homes of peasants never shed their tattered shawls of autumnal dust and sunsets that abrade window frames before the season’s final rain.

And in a factory town, nothing is ever excavated from the layers of soot that settle on it.

On this block, the air is that of someone—mother, the lady whose name I never knew, any of the women who stayed—or something, like a worn winter coat, that’s survived another season, somehow. Leave for a while, come back, and those same people, their coats, their houses, are still there, looking more worn and a bit heavier, but not any older than you remember.

Survival into the next season. That’s all any of us do, whether we stay on this block or leave it. Survive: It’s the operative word of the uncertain, the desperate, the deprived, the poor. Every mother thought about it—for herself and her child—whenever she gave birth on this block. Mother’s even admitted that sometimes she wasn’t sure of how or if I or she would make it. To this day, I don’t know all of how or what she did. But in spite of the beatings and deaths I experienced here, I wouldn’t say I’ve had a particularly hard life. After all, in spite of everything, I don’t recall having gone hungry.

Still, I’ve always told—and convinced—whomever I’ve met that I was poor. I wasn’t looking for sympathy; I only found myself in situations where I needed to sum up my childhood in a word. And it fit.

Perhaps nobody would agree with it, but I’ve come up with a foolproof definition of poverty. It’s when nobody can give you—and you don’t have any—advice on how to live. All they can tell you about is survival. How they survived. How you’ll survive. How others didn’t survive. They can even tell you of “good” and “bad” ways to die and what’s worth dying for: love, country, god, whatever. But nobody knows how to live, or for what. That’s why one of the few books written by a male that seemed to me in any way truthful was Angela’s Ashes. The guy who wrote it grew up poor by anybody’s definition of the word—including mine. And, by the same token, a poor little prep school boy, Holden Caulfield, is equally impoverished. Only from deprivations like his, or Frank Mc Court’s, is a man capable of speaking the truth.

68. Their Stories

For all that I’m recalling now, there’s much I never could tell, even if somebody’d want to hear it, to hear me.

Not that I know so much, or more than anybody else in this room. Certainly not more than mother. For that matter, I’m not sure that what I know, what any of us has ever known, matters now. But, like this block, it’s all anybody really knows.

The man the cops found in the basement and tagged with my former name—that man confirmed what I’d suspected ever since the cops broke down Adam’s door too late to keep him from suffocating in gas fumes. The police report, and the stories I’d heard about Adam—and, for that matter, anything anybody might’ve said about me since I left this block—confirm one of the few iron-clad truths I’ve learned: When a man from this block dies, whether here or someplace else, nobody ever really knows the whole story about his death.

Sometimes you hear outright lies—like Adam was possessed by evil spirits. Or the man they found in the basement was me. Or that my former name was that of a sexual predator, who was killed in retribution (or retaliation, depending on who’s talking) for his preying on young boys. Or that it was done by someone he didn’t pay, or who didn’t pay him.

Mrs. Littington—who declared Adam one of the tuer Christ—said that her god had avenged himself on the people who killed his representative on earth. In the time she lived on this block, she never went to church, and I never heard her mention—except for what she said about Adam—deities or anything else that existed beyond her own life. I didn’t have the courage, or whatever, to point out this self-contradiction to her. For that matter, neither she nor anyone else ever explained what was going on when Jesus—sentenced to hang on a cross for a crime that would’ve gotten him community service in other places and times—rose from the dead three days after his death. If he was God in human form, how—why—could he die? Why would he deem such an improbable act necessary to atone for the alleged sins of people.

Why—from a God whose divine will brought Adam to Bergen Belsen and this block and me into the body of a man—were there so many?

None of it made sense; none of it could be pieced together, any more than the accounts of the men who managed to escape this block, however briefly. Nor did the stories of heroism or treason in the wars they fought, or the grotesque details of dismembered corpses found in the rivers, bas, oceans, lots, garages and other places near this block that are seen by nobody who’s from here.

Men have always lied, exaggerated, distorted, omitted and embellished when telling of each other’s deaths. It’s noting new, and it’s been called journalism, biography, history (especially military history) and psychology. My one and only disappointment with the female race, so far, if that so many of us have, for so long, simply echoed what we’ve heard.

67. Memory of a Season

It still amazes me how little’s changed here. Sure, the only people remaining from the block as I knew it are in this room now. If you’re one of those people who believes that any neighborhood is its people, then you’d think that the place I knew ceased to exist long ago, perhaps when I left this block. You’d be right, in a way, I guess.

When I think of change, I’m not thinking about which houses have disappeared and which ones have been built, or what stores opened and closed, or what kinds of cars are parked around here. To tell you the truth, I don’t recall many of the places, at least not exactly. I’m not completely sure—except for the house where Adam lived and the one where mother and I stayed—which ones were here and which weren’t. Maybe it’s just as well: I’ve never had attachments to rooms, furnishings or architectural details. Good thing, too: When you have to move from one place to another as often as I have, sentimental attachments are the spindly heels that can break under you as you step up onto a curb.

But then there’s something else I recognized as soon as I got here. Some may call it a “feeling in the air.” It has to do with the light, which is the only thing that truly defines any place. No matter where I’ve woken, I’ve always known where I was—or, at least, where I wasn’t—by the light of the place.

The light on this block, even though it changes through seasons, cannot be mistaken for any other. The kind I recall most clearly seems to’ve begun today, or within the past few days. The sky is overcast, but the air is not completely gray: It’s been tinged by shingles and painted wood that’ve just begun to show splinters that were hidden by summer shadows. The day is also tinged with flecks of rust escaping from crumbling bricks.

In other places, they call the season with this light “autumn,” and it’s pretty. Here, it’s fall and it’s not melancholy, not sad. It just is, and everybody knows that winter—with or without snow—follows. And the gray, the white, will fill the street, the alleyways and ground between the houses like ash. When it clears away, some of the people—the women—you saw during the fall will sit on stoops, or scrape and poke little patches of ground around their houses. And sunlight will glare off pores of skin—faces, then arms and sometimes legs—newly uncovered. For what seems a brief moment, the faded paint and flaking bricks fill your eyes with echoes of colors struggling to rise from gaps of soil between slabs of concrete.

This cycle of light, my most vivid recollection, is now the only reason I could ever have to return to this block after mother’s gone. And I’m sure it’ll never change.

66. For Them

Weddings were always for other people. Just like graduations, or any prize I’d heard about. They handed kids diplomas in the schools we attended, but I don’t remember anybody I know getting one. And the ones who exchanged vows—they always came from someplace else, away from this block. And we never saw them again.

Other people. For all I know, mother’d never been married. Or maybe she was never not-married. Not until I got away from this block did I realize that kids learn, at some time or another, their parents were children who probably didn’t know each other. Then there was the ceremony like the ones I used to see in church. For one brief moment, they were as clear, as unambiguous, as black and white—because they bathed in the glow of whatever color of glass was struck by that day’s light. That hue would tinge whatever pictures people carried with them—even after the marriage dissolved—like the sepia in old photographs.

Mother never talked about whoever fathered me, much less about whatever circumstances brought them together, or how they came apart. Or, for that matter, if they were ever really together in the first place. Or, for that matter, where—much less how—she came to have me by him.

Other people got married. Other people had children. The kids on this block are like the houses, the church, the stores on the avenue—they are always in a moment, one that extends from the first to the last anybody can recall. They’re always there; nobody knows who or what was there before them; nobody remembers when they’re gone. And nobody sees them graduating or getting married: If they do those things, they’re somewhere else.

But the funerals…Mother, now. The man who got my former name when they found his body in the basement. Sammy and Don—two men I called “uncle” until they ended up in caskets that weren’t opened while I was at their funerals. Anthony Giordano, who volunteered for the Navy because he knew he was going to get drafted, who came home in a body bag. David Held, who was drafted. And—I know I’m jumping back and forth in time, whatever that is—Jimmy McCulley, who, it was said, “fell off the pier”—so close to this block, though I’ve never seen it—where his uncle used to unload boats. Freddy du Maars—all I ever heard was that he “fell.”

And, of course, Adam. From him to mother, death was always somebody I knew well—or at least as anybody I’ve known since. Except for the man in the cellar, I felt sorrow for them but I could’ve felt even more than I did if I hadn’t felt relief—and yes, I admit, envious—that they were finally out of that endless moment we all occupied. For Adam, and now for Mother, my sense of relief is heightened because they were—are—at least to my knowledge—no longer suffering on this block.

Death happened to them: the only two people, I believe, with whom I’ve ever truly empathized. Other people—if I could in any way relate to or care about their experiences—I could only imagine, or just think about, whatever pain they might’ve conveyed in my direction.

I’ve been to other funerals since I left this block. For a while, it seemed that every week someone I met in a bar or on the street died of AIDS or was shot or beaten to death. I went to their funerals whenever I could, not because I thought it would change anything, but because of something Mother taught me: You give respect to people whether or not they know you’re giving it. If she’s right—and nothing I’ve seen tells me she isn’t—then respect is all you can give the dead if you’re going to give them anything at all.

For that alone, she deserves my respect. And of course for many other reasons, the first of which is that she did something I’ll never do—not even after the surgery: She gave birth. To me.

65. Too Late For Laments

Soon I will no longer have any need, or reason, to feel shame or to apologize. I can’t recall mother having done either, or that she ever expected one or the other of me. When I was a child, some kids stole other kids’ bikes or jackets, insulted each other by questioning each other’s sexuality or practices, or damaged or destroyed property. I did none of those things, although they were done to me. Certainly that didn’t make me any more moral than, or superior to, anyone else.

I realize now that you only learn about shame and contrition when you’ve had to express them yourself. The only such experience I had growing up was having to say something called “The Act of Contrition” during mass. I didn’t understand it, even after I looked up the word “contrition,” probably because it made no sense for me—or anyone, really—to say it. Even at such a young age, I realized how silly it was, and how it was even sillier to talk to someone who wasn’t there, especially if someone told you he was there but couldn’t tell you where, much less how or why.

For that matter, all apologies now seem absurd—now there’s a word I wish I’d known then!—in the way that alarms installed after a burglary seem pointless and useless. The deed is done; the doer is gone—mentally, if not physically. He’s gone on to other things, unless of course he’s rationalizing or gloating over what he’s done. In which case he isn’t going to apologize anyway.

Even if I’d given that man a chance to acknowledge his rape of me, it wouldn’t’ve changed him, or me, or anything. You could even say that if he could or would see how he’d violated me, he wouldn’t’ve said he was sorry. I wonder now whether that’s what mother thought.

And so it wouldn’t’ve made any sense, or changed anything, if I’d apologized for having retaliated—had I done such a thing—in the moment after he attacked me, or in the future. Beating, mutilating, killing him wouldn’t’ve been acts of rage, an emotion that precludes—some say precedes, but I don’t see how—sorrow.

Mother never expected apologies from me, even though nothing I’ve done, nothing I’ve become, justifies the difficulties I caused her. I’ll never know—though I can guess accurately, I think—whether she’d wanted or planned for me. Not that she ever implied, even in anger, that I constricted her life, as other parents have told children who became some of the people I’ve met since I left this block. Vivian’s father always reminded her of his abandoned ambitions toward a musical career, or that he’d played drums behind guitarists and singers whose records kids—and sometimes their parents—in my generation, even on my block, bought and listened to. Maybe mother had no such aspirations, simply because she didn’t have time to have them. But if she’d had dreams, I never heard about them.

It’s no surprise, I guess, that she never even made me apologize for not having aspirations of my own. For one thing, I was never sure I’d grow up to realize them. In fact, I was sure I wouldn’t live long enough, or that if I did I’d end up in jail or a mental hospital. That’s what happened to the young men here—or else they simply disappeared. Even if I survived to seventeen, eighteen years old on this block, I’d had no idea how I’d finish high school, much less go to college. Not that I’d want either one. School, for me, was always just a place where I was prey and supposed to get used to it. And expect no apologies, no expressions of shame from anyone.

Not that I would’ve expected anything from the other kids—mostly boys—or the teachers, the principal or anybody else. Kids beat up other kids in the hope that someone else wouldn’t beat them. They won fights, games, competitions—none of which mattered away from school, much less this block—so they wouldn’t have to experience defeat for the moment, a day or—they hoped—forever. They did what they did—just as I lied, stole, sold my body and killed—and offered no apologies or explanations for the same reasons I didn’t, mother didn’t, why nobody on this block did. You don’t—or perhaps you can’t—justify anything you do to survive, to make it from one moment to the next. Some people—we often hear about them in the news—may try to offer an expression of contrition, an acceptance of responsibility, for their deeds or those of their parents, long after they’re done. But they’re not lamenting the deeds themselves: Usually, they’re ruing some outcome of it. Like that scientist who said “I have become death!”– or something like that– long after he and his colleagues exploded the first atomic bomb.

64. Fall

Days’ve been growing shorter. At times, that would’ve meant more work, or at least more time for it. At times like that, I’d hardly see daylight. I probably won’t for the next few months.

It’s one of those things you never stop noticing if you’ve had to notice it before: the length of darkness, not the lack of daylight. On this block, you don’t see those bright, sunny vistas stretching endlessly, like the ones you see in all those paintings and photos in the books they try to make you like in school. The sidewalks, the street, the tar and slate on the roofs, the darkening bricks and shingles refract any light from the sky into shadows and other shades of gray.

And the night: It’s just another, deeper shade of charcoal—what’s left at the end of the day.

So in spite of—no, because of—all the fears I’ve had, I’ve never been afraid of the dark. On this block, it’s a bit of a relief. When you’re a very young kid, nobody expects anything of you, except perhaps that you sleep at some specified hour. There’s nobody to beat or harass you on your way to or from school. Nobody snubs you or starts conversation when you’re in your house, alone. And nobody else did when I was with mother.

It’ll be night—evening for those who don’t work—soon. Nothing you can do about it, but nothing to fear, either. Didn’t some poet say that we don’t die from darkness; instead, we die from cold?

When it gets dark, I get to come in from the cold. Or at least I’d find ways out of it. Late on a fall or winter afternoon—at least sometimes—I walk in the chilly air, looking for my way out. Shadows disappear and headlights reflect off my shiny boots and glows in the sheen of my make-up.

Someone brings me into a room and turns out the lights. After a while, even the acrid, salty smells of a man’s skin and hair fade away with the honking, shouting and skidding on the street. Here is only the rough, bristly feel of hairs when the flesh presses or pulls away my flesh. Of course it helps to numb your nerve endings with the bottle, the pipe or the needle. You move from one to another as your need deepens. It always does; everyone who’s sold his or her body will tell you that if they’ll tell you anything.

All touching, all kissing, all caressing lead to penetration—something that is always, by definition, against the will of the penetrated. So the practices to which people refer when they’re talking about “making love” always pierce into that same places, into the those same places—for me, under my spleen and back in my throat—where you were first entered, through stealth or overt violence.

I’ve been told that at the end of the transition I’m making, I’ll no longer have a sex life or, as some have called it, a “love life’. That doesn’t deter me now. Until I left this block, my body was always used by people—actually, males—I never saw again. Nothing changed, except that now I get paid.

I guess that in that way, at least, I’m not different from most people, on this block or off it. Things happen for no apparent reason; after you get paid for them, then you pay.

And the nights are getting longer now. Just as mother’s leaving.

63. The Price

All of my life, I’ve respected only one man: Adam. I recall him whenever I’m in the presence of anybody who’s just died, or when I hear about any death that matters to me.

Death is death. Vivian told me that, I think. She’s probably right, although I don’t know how she’d’ve known. We all become the same minerals; we feed worms, fish or some other scavengers when we’re dead. And in the end, I guess it doesn’t matter whether we’ve enabled a swimmer, crawler or flyer to continue living. It probably doesn’t even matter whether we’re interred whole, or buried or submerged in the ocean. There’s not much difference, really, except that the sad people—he ones born into grief and burdened with sorrow—always seem to want their corpses immolated.

After Adam died—was murdered—an intense heat—one that covered or at least occupied and filled—a hollow within—and I’m not just talking about a mere physical “inside of”—me. Mother often scolded me for leaving the house in the dead of winter without my coat. “But I’m too hot!” She insisted, demanded—but to my recollection, never threatened. And I’d wear my coat for as long as I could stand it or until mother was out of sight.

That feeling—heat coursing through me, as if from a fire no one notices because it’s deep in the ground—pushed up through my pores whenever someone I knew died from AIDS or was driven to that act the police and others conveniently classified as “suicide.”

There was none of that after the cops found the body to which they gave my former name. The cops called that one a murder—case closed. And no doubt it was, at least in the way they understand it. But he was not Adam; he was no Adam.

As I am not.

As for mother, the heat is rising, closer to the surface. It has nothing to do with the temperature of the room in which her body has been laid out: The other attendees—both of them—are wearing sweaters over their black dresses. I took off my jacket but I still feel beads of sweat forming just below my neck. Getting hotter; I don’t want the heat to consume me. Oh, if only there were a pool, or even a bathtub, here! The ocean’s only a couple of miles away. But I’ve never gotten to it from this block and have no idea of how to do that. I know the ocean’s there—at least I’ve always accepted it as some sort of knowledge—from the maps I saw when I was in school. Mother’d never’ve been any help on this one: She never went to the ocean, either.

I don’t know that Adam did, either. I’m not even sure he ever left that stoop, except to go in the house. He wasn’t like all the other men I’ve known—at least the ones I recall—who always seem to have the need to go some place or another, even if they’re always going to the same places. If they came back, they’d lie about what they’d done and where they’d been. They’d slept with everybody, or nobody. They didn’t have to pay for it, or they could afford whatever they wanted. Loved and spat upon, conquering fear yet with fear all the time. No need; they can’t do without. The same stuff, everywhere I’ve gone.

Except from Adam. He’s the only person I’ve known—except for mother, and then only after I left this block—who could give me something without demanding something else from me; who didn’t abandon or betray me when I made choices because I had no choice but to make them. He accepted shyness swaddled in 11-year-old baby fat; she never questioned me about the transformation I’m making, the next stage of which she won’t see.

Nor, for that matter, will the other two women in this room. Does the woman whose name I never knew realize who she’s seeing? She glances my way again; I see her squints and stares. Eyes like hers can’t hide furtiveness, which is to say attempts at stealth. They seem gray, lifeless, to anyone who sees her only for a moment. Any more than that, and you can see her color– not quite blue or hazel or any other hue you’ve seen before—registering, it seems, tones and volumes pulsing from your blood, your bones or something else you don’t see when she sees you.

At that moment, it seems, she decides whether or not she decides to speak to you. Today, for the first time, I caught her indecision and uncertainty. When I lived on this block, I knew she’d never speak to me. Or to that man who used to come around to fight with mother. She never spoke to Mrs. Littington, and I doubt that she will today.

She’s looking my way again.

I never saw her speak to Adam: She never seemed to leave her house; nor did he leave his. But here she is, with mother and Mrs. Littington.

And him.

Out of respect for mother. For the ones she knew, with whom she shared coffee or roasted chickens, for whoever ate the drumsticks and wings. But not the necks. I still haven’t tried them. Mother never would’ve allowed that. For the boy she raised, from whom she kept his father, at least for as long as she could.

At least I never had to pretend I belonged to him. In fact, I’ve never had to respect him or any other man, so I never did. Except for Adam. He’s probably the only man I ever met, to this day, who could offer me a simple pleasure without obligations, without entanglements. He offered nothing more than those five-ounce bottles of soda and, when the mood suited him—or me—a conversation, sometimes a story.

Too bad about the way he died. But he’s still the only man who, to my knowledge, didn’t kill or inflict some other sort of violence on another person. I don’t know what he did before he got to this block, or at least whether he got to live because someone else didn’t. But, at least for the time he lived here, he didn’t kill or maim, or cause the death of anyone else.

Though bottles of soda are valuable currency in the world of children, he never extorted promises or confessions with them. Usually, when a man pays for something, he thinks it’s subject solely to his whims, his impulses. Don’t ever let a man pay for you; otherwise, you owe him. If he knows he’s going to see you again, he might wait. But if he’s in your life for an hour, he’ll take whatever he can get. If he pays for dinner, he’ll take the night from you. If he pays for your body, he thinks he can beat you. The only question is whether he’ll do it before or after he fucks you.

My stories weren’t so different from those of the girls who walked the streets. None will ever tell you of an encounter with a man like Adam.

On this block, nobody would ever speak of him.

62. Aftermath

There’d never been a fire on this block, at least not one that anybody remembered, until that body to which they gave my name was found in the basement of that house three doors away from the one in which mother and I lived. The brick shell remained; everything else—the walls, the tables and chairs that’d been left behind, the concrete in the basement—had burned into dusty ash. Including the body, or most of it, anyway.

Word on this block said a lot of things. Someone settled a longstanding grudge. But who? Mother? The lady whose name I never knew? From what I know, no woman ever killed a man on this block, mainly because men didn’t stay long enough. Or, like Adam—actually, there was nobody else like Adam; he lived here alone in every sense of the word.

The cause of the fire, like the death of the body in the basement, was never determined—at least not officially. There was no report of an inspection; as far as anybody knows, none was ever done. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised there wasn’t much of an investigation into the death discovered underneath the house.

It’s probably just as well. Some detective, some inspector, could’ve—if he’d wanted and was allowed to do some work—find some “evidence.” The could’ve used it to prove, or at least claim, that someone died at a certain hour from blows to the head, blood loss or shock, and that the body died before it burned. Or whatever. And that the fire began whenever they said it did, sparked by spontaneous combustion. Or whatever explanation they came up with.

And difference would any of it’ve made, anyway? If that body had been mine, the cessation of its movement would’ve mattered only to two people on this block. And mother’s on her way out. For everyone else, it’s another story to exaggerate or embellish in whispers. You can’t spread anything without stretching, bending or otherwise distorting it.

I was there to revenge or collect—what? And someone stopped me. That’s one story I heard. Another: some lover, some ex-lover did it. What would that person’ve been doing on this block, anyway? What would I’ve been doing there, for that matter?

Funny how nobody asked those questions. Not the cops, not the fire inspectors; nobody. Then again, I don’t imagine that anyone on this block would’ve talked to them. I know I never would. They wouldn’t know a murder if it were mailed to them. I mean, they listed Adam as a suicide. And up to the day I left, that’s what everybody insisted—if they mentioned him at all.