61. Exposure

Drizzly, rainy day. Late morning. Or later in the day, perhaps.

One window at the end of two long walls, my head at the other end. In between, gray grainy haze. Could be the rain, but I don’t hear it; I didn’t hear the window. Only the cold.

I pull the sheet over my face. The bed—just a mattress propped on iron bars—I don’t recognize it. These sheets bristle, grainy against my skin.

Otherwise, I’d’ve never noticed I hadn’t showered in a few days. In those days, I could get away with that. I could’ve—in fact, later I did—grow a beard and nobody would’ve cared. Except maybe for him.

He’s bored his head into my chest and tangled himself around me so I can’t see him. Only the gray, rainy haze; the sheets—I couldn’t see the color—bristling against my skin. And cold on the other side.

Dark hair. How did I know? His chest rasped against mine. But I never saw it, never saw him. Or his lips, at my neck or at the tip of my penis. Only felt his lips when they were around my soft slack slab of skin. Skin and saliva between my thighs.

Wet and gray and grainy. Then just wet, and cold outside. Wet, a sudden rush, I’m not ready. Never saw it coming; never saw it. Just a rush through me; I couldn’t hold it back. Not because he wouldn’t let me.

59. Exile’s Children

I didn’t leave this block because I felt stifled or tortured. Nor did I go with any mission or calling, or even any sort of ambition beyond staying alive. And I wanted that because, as the saying goes, “What’s the alternative?” I still don’t have the answer.

Long before I knew I would undergo the transformation I’m about to culminate, I knew I couldn’t stay. Even before I learned about the hormones, the surgeries and the people who submitted to them, I knew that some part of me wouldn’t survive the move from here. Yet it was necessary for survival—mine, at any rate. And, I realize now, the reason mother never begged me to come back was that she knew, too. She always expected I’d return, however briefly.

Somehow she survived this place—until now, anyway. I’m not sure she would’ve had she left. But she had no reason—or at least not the same one I had—to get out of here. A mother, a single mother, like many others here—most of whom were here before her—there’s never been any shame in that here, at least not among the women. The nuns were a different story. “You didn’t have a father. You’ll never become a man,” Sister Elizabeth yelled at me in a room full of kids who would’ve snickered had she not slashed the air with her long wooden ruler. And she wasn’t the only one who reminded me—actually, who reminded the other kids, I didn’t need it—of my family situation.

It was probably all I had in common with other kids on this block. There were a couple of others in Sister Elizabeth’s class that day. One—Howard—laughed, for which Sister Elizabeth slapped him. But the other, Louisa Parker, slid her pale oval face into her long angular hands so I could see only her shaggy dark hair.

They’re gone, too. Howard ended up in the army. Whether he joined or was sentenced to it, no one’s exactly sure. He ended up in some place in the Middle East—some place where all you see are men—and never returned. No one ever said why. And Louisa—all I know is that someone saw her on a street in New Orleans, or in some other city besides this one. Why she left this block, I don’t know. Can’t say I can’t blame her because I don’t know whether she had to leave. She probably did: It’s the only way I know of that anybody goes from here.

58. Moment Fugue

When you’re on this block, you have one thing in common with anyone else here: the moment, this moment. Some have lived in it for longer than you; others’ve just come into it. But you and they and I—are all in it, for the moment, for as long as we’re here.

Maybe you really do have to die to leave it. I don’t remember who told me that. Maybe Adam, maybe mother. Or maybe—like the question you know not to ask—I learned it simply from being here, just from being. That’s how Adam and mother left. And the man who fathered me. The lady whose name I never knew is still here, and Mrs. Littington, for all that she participated in the gossip, was never part of it because everybody knew she wasn’t staying. And of course, after today she’ll be gone again, having flitted into and out of the moment, the last mother and I will have.

Now, only now. I’ve been to lots of other places where people lamented some monument or edifice that once stood in their midst, in their moment. Then it was smashed, exploded or burned and something else was assembled in its place. Or maybe the place is left empty. The people mourn the passing of whatever’d been there before but they stop remembering it the moment it was gone. No one remembers the squalid squares in the old railway stations or the drab columns of office buildings, apartment houses or the local store. Somehow, in memory, whatever is lost rises into towering arches filled with the soft, smoky haze of sun through windows high near the ceiling. Anything—even the moment of this block—can dissipate in that light.

On my way back to this block, I passed by the onetime financial center of this city. Its most famous—tallest—structures were gone, leveled by what architects, engineers, scientists and those who wrote and spoke for them claimed their steel-girded glass boxes could withstand. I called mother when I heard about their destruction. Just making sure she was all right, even though I knew she’d never been anywhere near them. Everyone, it seemed, who’d ever seen a photo of the buildings was calling somebody. Other people’d had to wait hours to get to one of the phones on the street. Not me—Gail, whom I’d met while I was still cursing Vivian, slipped a cell phone into my bag. I didn’t realize I had the phone until the first time it rang. When the buildings fell, I broke her rule that I use it only to answer her, and called mother.

Now I use only cellphones.

I’m getting away from myself. Those houses of cathode ray screens and paper, built like a box of drinking straws with the middle straws removed, were gone. I noticed their absence only because nothing stood in their place. I recalled how they cast shadows over the streets, the people, even the other tall buildings around it. But the fall of those steel beams, and the glass panes shackled to the fluorescent space around them, did not flood the corners and alleyways with suddenly-unsealed sunlight. The skyscrapers that still stood spread over each other and stilted solar pulses through the channels between offices and cigar stores, the snakeskin-smoothed sidewalks and the coiled cables of the bridge between that part of town and the precincts around this block.

“The Towers,” as everyone called them, were gone. But apart from their general shape—breadboxes sliced on the ends and sides with serrated knives—I could recall nothing else about them. Not the details, scarecely visible on such tall buildings, yet present enough for the news reports to point out as metalworkers took apart what remained after the explosions. I vaguely recalled the view from the top, the end of some trip on a school bus and up a series of elevators with a bunch of boys who wanted to beat up a “faggot” and a teacher—a nun who would—could ‘–ve done nothing to stop them. I knew there was something called an ”observation deck” at the end of the elevator ride, but it could’ve been a milk crate for all that I could recall.

It’d been part f some moment long ago, which might’ve continued to today had I or the Towers not gone. But the fall was inevitable: the Towers’ moment wouldn’t, couldn’t, last into this one. Nor could that moment in which I lived through the births and deaths I witnessed and helped to cause.

After mother’s buried, the moment—long as it was—of this block will end, at least for me. The lady whose name I never knew—I don’t know. No one else from that time remains here. Then again, the moment began before Mrs. Littington came to this block, before I was born, before she or mother were born. And it continued through the disappearance of the man who fathered me and the day when the police retrieved a body and gave it my former name.

57. Who Do They Talk To?

I don’t know whether Mrs. Littington knows about the man whose body was found in the basement. The body with my name. Maybe the lady whose name I never knew told her. Then again, I suspect not. Why would they begin speaking now? But you never know what circumstances will prompt.

There’s no reason—I hope—for either of them to talk to me now. I’d had a close call on the way to the bathroom when the lady whose name I never knew followed me—or so I thought. For sure, she’d turn the glance she caught of me into a cross-examination. When you’re a kid on this block, it seems that adults are always doing that to you—even the ones who’d never talk to you, or let you talk to them, under any other conditions.

Even if they know, it won’t matter. Or so I hope. Who’s Mrs. Littington going to tell, anyway. Wherever she’s going, I’m sure there’s no one to whom any of this’ll matter. As for the other woman: With mother gone, who can she talk to? I don’t think she gets out—of this block—much; she never did. What she’s wearing now looks like one of those housedresses she always wore, only in black.

Shehasn’t angled her head toward Mrs. Littington the way she did with mother. I’d never see her actually turn her eyes, her nose, her mouth, in the direction of mother. But I could always tell when she was turning her attention toward mother, when she was about to speak as soon as I couldn’t hear.

I’m hoping she doesn’t, for the first time (at least to my knowledge), do the same with Mrs. Littington. They’d’ve had at least one common topic—mother—for gossip or whatever. And if they talked about her, I imagine they’d talk about me, whether or not they realized I was in the room with them, not in that cellar on that last cold afternoon before summer, when the police found the body to which they’d attach my name—my former name.

Hopefully, I won’t have another close encounter today. I never could’ve explained myself to anyone on this block when I was living here—at least, not in any way that they could hear. Then again, I never could’ve told them anything they’d wanted to know. Nothing’s changed.: I know, therefore I can’t say.

Could they’ve recognized me, even after all those years and all the changes? Of course, they say some things never change. Once, by chance, I met a friend of Vivian’s in a café, far away from this block or her town. “I recognize you from someplace. Your eyes…” Her name flashed into my mind, but of course I couldn’t say it. I pretended to ignore her, and she left.

56. Identification

At least I haven’t seen any cops. Maybe it wouldn’t matter if I did. Could they make a positive ID of me? They couldn’t with that body in the basement; how could they identify a living person? Especially if that person’s changed since the police started searching?

Not that they have any reason for stopping or questioning me. Not really. Then again, the cops, especially the ones around here, know how to extract confessions from mouths that never had to hold secrets. Vivian used to talk about the “highway blues,” when an officer could tail you, pull up alongside you and pull you over even though you hadn’t gone over the speed limit or in the wrong lane, and somehow you’d do something—you couldn’t deny it—and the officer would write a summons. Really, officer, I didn’t kill anyone. Especially not mother. Of course not. I hadn’t even been on the block at the time she died—or when the body in the basement gave up its last. Everybody—at least the woman whose name I never knew—knows that. I hadn’t been here in years. How many? Well, gee, officer, I’m not quite sure. So much has happened and well, you know how time flies.

But they’re not here now. Just me, Mrs. Litttington, the woman whose name I never knew—and mother’s body, in the casket.

55. Before Tomorrow

Today. Just today. I just have to get through this day in one piece. It’s the only way anybody’s ever lived on this block and it’s the only mode of life I’ve known since I left.

I can’t say whether anything’ll change after tomorrow. I know that I’ll never come back to this block again. It’s not a choice: I have no choice. Not that I’ve ever wanted to return. But I have no such choice in any event. Never did, probably never will.

Just today. Tomorrow, if it goes the way I foresee it, we bury mother. Hopefully, nothing’ll complicate maters until then. Mrs. Littington and the woman whose name I never knew glance in my direction, but neither speaks to me. Maybe they talk to each other when I’m out of sight, but I don’t recall that they had much, if anything, to say to do with each other when we were on this block. Their only connection was mother, and I’ve no idea of how much they talked about each other to her.

I’m not even sure that Mrs.L. and the lady recognize each other now, although—somehow not surprisingly—Mrs. L. seems not to’ve aged beyond a few gray flecks in her darker-than-chestnut hair. The edges of her hair that frame her forehead, temples and ears have softer, wavier edges than those of the sharper cut she wore when she lived on this block—but somehow even that seems not to’ve changed much, either. For that matter, the lady whose name I never knew doesn’t seem much older than I recall her, either; but her loose and dry skin always made her seem older than mother, or most of the other people on this block. Then again, I’d just barely passed puberty the last time I saw her. All the adults—which is to say the women—on this block seemed like fixtures that’d always been there.

Every once in a while, she catches my gaze. Maybe she won’t ask questions. That’s the unwritten—That goes without saying!—code of this block. Then again, she never needed to ask questions, or so it seemed.

Another code is not to tell, at least not so the person who’s being told about knows. Would she? Could she? Who was it who told me, “Them that know don’t tell; but them who tell don’t know”? What did thatt person know? What does she know? What—who—would she tell? Being on this block, still, she had to’ve heard about the body in the cellar. The one with my name—my former name—on it. And my date of birth. But not my date of death. Surely she had to’ve known better than to believe that version of the end of a life. On this block, who’d’ve remained, by that time, who’d’ve had any reason to kill me? The men—the boys—were all gone by then. Including me.

Who, then, ‘d’ve gone through the trouble of striking him on the head hard enough to knock him to the ground, but not hard enough to prevent him from regaining consciousness. Who’d’ve been anygry, obsessive or whatever enough to tie him by his hands and feet and tape his mouth while his eyes were shut? To peel the too-tight black pants and bikini brief away from his hairy midsection? Or—when he regained consciousness and grunted because he couldn’t beg for mercy—took a sawtoothed switchblade and gnarled at the base of his scrotum and removed an organ which to this day has not been found? And finally pulled—actually, slid and slogged—the briefs and pants back over the bloody crotch, hooked the waist tab and zipped the fly shut just as red heat began to ooze through them?

Could she’ve known t he answers, or enough to question what I –or the man whose body was identified as mine—would’ve been doing anywhere near this block at that time? As far as she knew—or so I thought—I was long gone, and possibly dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what mother told her. Or if she said nothing at all, except that I don’t think that lady’d’ve let her.

Hopefully, she won’t ask any more questions—or talk any more—about him or me, or to me—before this day is over, before I can leave for good, like mother, tomorrow.

One more day and mother finally gets to rest. And I’ll be able to continue—and hopefully complete—my transformation.

54. Omerta

The official reports called Adam’s death a suicide. Given the circumstances under which he was found, it wouldn’t—couldn’t—‘ve been ruled any other way. The police department, the medical examiner and others involved in the case would therefore not be required to investigate any further. And there wasn’t any reason for them to do so: They found no more physical evidence and after questioning people on the block—including mother and Mrs. Littington—they probably didn’t know any more about Adam, or why he filled his apartment with cooking gas.

The people of this block could stop any questioning or discussion of any incident—such as Adam’s death—even faster than the officials of the city or state ever could. Mother or the nuns—and later, the teachers—always told me I asked too many questions. I hadn’t seen him for several months—an era, at that time in my life—before the police marked off that front stoop with their orange bands.

Mother, who’d had more troubles than I’d realized then, said it’s something she could’ve done, but she could only think of those she’d leave behind. I’m sure other women on this block felt the same way. Sister Elizabeth said that in times of trouble everyone has a patron saint—and God. But what if…She wouldn’t say any more about it and would upbraid my mother for her child’s “morbid curiosity.”

Snow covered the stoop; it cleared away. The stoop, then the house, were painted over, but nobody moved in. Everybody, it seemed, could tell when I was going to ask about Adam, about what happened that night before Christmas Eve, when the wind that carried the snow and whispered its hissing admonition to close one’s eyes and leave the darkness under blankets, under layers of snow.

The sun had already disappeared behind heavy veils of clouds; the full moon—it was so bright I could sit next to the window in my room and read by it—illuminated the last clear sky I could remember seeing for a long time afterward.

During the spring that followed, it seemed that the woman whose name I never knew was taking more care than usual to keep her bushes from growing up over her flowers, or the sidewalk. Sunny days were full of overpowering glare we were used to seeing only on those summer days when people stayed inside their houses or in shade.

Out in the sun on such a day, you could exhale and it would feel like wind from the surface of the sun rushing back at your face. And the clouds, and even the rain, seized the flaking, peeling bricks and stained and tarnished metal sheets of the houses and bound them in a thick gray haze that seemed still only because the people of this block hadn’t noticed—or had forgotten—when it came and went.

Sister Elizabeth lost patience she never had and slapped me across the face for “thinking about evil, selfish deeds” and not keeping my mind on the day’s lesson. What did I care about base six numeral systems—I think that’s what she was teaching—anyway? What did that have to do with Adam or mother or me or anyone else on the block? About as much as patron saints had to do with Adam, I thought. Would he’ve been alive had he known what a polynomial or a declension was? Would any of the stuff they were teaching’ve made my father—whom I didn’t know, or rather, didn’t want to know—care enough to stay with me and mother, or made him able to help us, or at least not to hurt us?

Catechism, mathematics, all those subjects whose names come from languages nobody on this block spoke or would care to speak—What good would those things do him, me, mother, anybody? But mother still insisted I go to school and learn. She responded to my protests that “you never needed that stuff” with the same glancing glare she gave whenever I mentioned Adam or asked about the ones—almost always teenaged boys and men—whom I saw one day and were gone another.

Through that year, the sun glared more blindingly and clouds grew heavier and more impenetrable like secrets. The haze between them draped windows and doors all over this block.

Nobody wanted to hear the stories Adam told me, and after his death mother and Sister Elizabeth and everyone else wanted me to forget them. The cops’d asked mother, Mrs. Littington, the woman whose name I never knew—everyone, it seemed, except me—what they knew about Adam. At first, I’d thought they skipped me only because of my age: They didn’t ask the few other kids on this block, either.

Then again, the cops were like the adults on this block and the teachers in one way: If you were a kid, they asked you questions only if they thought you’d done something wrong, or knew who did. That is to say, they’d ask if they thought you could give the answers they wanted to hear. Certainly, I couldn’t’ve told them any more than they already knew about the circumstances of that night Adam died. By the same token, I’m sure they weren’t ready to hear me recount the stories he told me, any more than they’d have any use for one inescapable fact: The adults of this block were speaking in the same furtive, clipped tones—and were scolding me and other children into silence in the same ways—as they did after any death or other tragedy or mishap the people of this block would deny or try to wash away.

53. Winter

Some things I’ll never understand. Others, they won’t—not Mrs. Littington, the lady whose name I never knew—understand. Including the one thing I’m still trying to explain to myself.

The way Adam died. The story we all heard, the one that’s listed in the reports, is suicide. Found with head in oven, gas turned on. Still cold in the apartment, cold as it was outside. And clear, with stars as bright as the strings of lights glinting on cables of the bridge you can see across the cemetery from this block.

He’d’ve seen that bridge from his window, as I could from mother’s room, on such a night: the sky even clearer than the glass that separated me—and him—from it. It’s so clear on such a night, whipped by the early winter winds that come before a storm. Two nights before Christmas, eight before the end of the year.

Buried, gone before New Year’s Day. Then the stoop where he sat, where he gave me little bottles of soda as he sighed, coughed and sometimes talked, that stoop disappeared under snow—the heaviest this block had ever seen, according to the weather reports. For days, for weeks, the snow lay stubbornly, not yielding to footprints.

Nobody came or went. Far as anybody knew, nobody—not another person, or even a cat or a dog—lived there. I don’t remember anyone exiting or leaving that house and I’m not sure anyone sat on that stoop when I wasn’t there with Adam.

Haven’t seen anybody on that stoop today, either. From what I’ve heard, people don’t do that anymore—in fact, nobody stops for very long on this block. Most of the time, the sidewalk’s vacant. When anybody walks, she doesn’t stop until she’s inside her house or off this block, headed to wherever else she’s going.

From what I hear, nobody’s sat or stood on that stoop since the last time I saw Adam. After the snow cleared, after the ice melted and the shadows that precede evenings were swept into extra minutes, then hours, of light at the end of the day, the bricks of that stoop and that house crinkled and started to come apart at the cement seams that held them together like stitches of winter coats at the end of the season, when the weather’s still cold enough to wear them but there’s enough light to show how worn they are. Someone came over to look at them, mark them. Then other men accompanied him, chipping, scraping and painting. I don’t know who those men were—nobody said, and Adam didn’t have any relatives anybody knew about—but they were there, it seemed, the first day the weather broke. In almost no time, they smothered the flaking red bricks with a sticky shine in the color of chewing gum.

52. Identities

So, as far as anybody on this block knows—if they ever know anything at all—that body found in the basement was mine. Or, at any rate, that of the person who bore the name I once had. Now that mother’s died, there’s nobody left on this block who remembers that person with that name. Only the body: If they’ve heard about anything, that’s it.

Just what I expected: Once the body’s gone, so’s the person. All of the people who could possibly remember any of the time I spent on this block are in this silent room now. And I have to wonder just how much they remember. Actually, I hope not much. That woman whose name I never knew did a double-take when I walked to the bathroom. But I don’t think—I’m not sure—she made a connection. Mrs. Littington didn’t seem to notice at all. She used to do that a lot—until she told mother she heard me using curse words or saw me smoke around her kids.

Maybe she’s recalling those times. Or she isn’t. Pas important, as she would say. She might’ve been looking my way, perhaps not. But somehow I don’t think she’ll ever recall me, mother or anybody in this room as soon as she leaves. As far as I know, there’s no reason why she should, for she never seemed to share even what little taste her husband had for telling amusing stories about all the places to which they’d gone and from which they’d come, like the people they met and left. When she talked about any place besides this block, or any person who wasn’t here, her eyes never met those of anyone standing or sitting within her vicinity. She might’ve been looking at someone—a member of her family, someone who lived in Toulon before the war, the aunt in Paris, one of the many expatriate Europeans she encounters in verandas and parlors misplaced throughout the world—and describe what she saw and what they said. As soon as she finished her monologue, her gaze disappeared and she returned to this block.

She’ll be gone soon; so, I hope, will I. She and the woman whose name I never knew don’t seem to recognize each other at all—actually, I think Mrs. Littington doesn’t remember her, and she won’t make any attempt to bring Mrs. L back to this block. For that, the lady whose name I never knew has my respect, if not my love– were I capable of giving any.

Neither of them, none of us will be here tomorrow, any more than the body that was pulled out of that basement. The one that was supposed to be mine. The one that was too old—though no one but the medical examiner could’ve known—to be mine.

The body was removed; the body was moved. That’s the sequence believed and reiterated by the cops, reporters and everyone else who matched that body to the person they believed to be in it. No one’s name is ever mentioned; they are only signatures at the ends of reports. Police officers, medical examiner, coroner, undertaker—I’d guess there was an undertaker, or someone in charge of whatever rite followed the autopsy and all the rest, because he was buried in a cemetery: the same one into which we’re going to place mother’s body. The man who ran the place wouldn’t have it any other way, it seems: A religious—Catholic or Jewish—ceremony for the body’s death is required for entrance into the gates surrounding the rows of marble slabs. As far as I know, they don’t have vaults, urns or anything else for people who’ve been cremated, or for that matter, a tombstone that doesn’t have a cross or Magden David on it.

Enbalmed, with a clean suit or dress. Frozen in a moment that never existed, for eternity or posterity or whatever they want to call it. A moment that never was: the eternal present.

If the moment never existed, nor did the people who lived in—I mean, bodies that passed through—it. They can—will—would—no more accompany the body they’ve sealed against light, air and water than the person who inhabited will return to that time, to this block.

No more than mother will. Or he, or I. As long as someone thinks I was inside that body at the moment of its death, or that it had the same name I once had, it might be safe to stay here, on this block Or maybe not. But I know that if anybody asks the question—actually, any question—I’d have to go. Now I know why mother and the nuns and teachers I had didn’t want me to ask “too many questions.”

Where was I at the moment I was supposed to have died? Where is the person, the name, that once belonged to the body?

51. From The Ground

Even if nobody here recognizes me, even if none of them recall me from the days when I lived on this block, I’ve got to get away as soon as mother’s in the cemetery. She’s not going to be buried in the plots at either end of this neighborhood; nobody—at least nobody from this block—‘s been buried in them for a long time.

They all ended up under a lawn about an hour and a half’s drive away from here. White slabs blister the ground; on a bright summer day you have to squint to read them. Each one’s the same: name, date of birth, date of death. The only differences are that some slabs have crosses carved into them between the names and dates, while others’ names and dates are separated by the Magden David. If you grew up on this block, everybody you knew was Jewish or Catholic. You realized there were “Protestants;” later, Presbyterians and Baptists and such: all those Christians separated and converged, never speaking to each other unless forced to do so. Like the Hasidic and the Orthodox and Reformed Jews: If you grew up on this block, those are the distinctions you make between people.

And if I’d ended up in that graveyard, as mother soon will, they’d consider me Catholic, like her. It wouldn’t matter, really, how or where I died: Whether the blood was in my crotch or on my hands, it would be the same. Nor would it matter that she didn’t make me kneel next to my bed and pray every night, or even that she said nothing even though she knew that I’d stopped attending church not long after she ran out of money to send me to Catholic school.

But what would they make of me now? The cemetery isn’t religious, at least to my knowledge. It’s not like one of those Orthodox cemeteries that won’t take you if you get tattooed or pierced, or one of those Catholic burial grounds that doesn’t allow anyone in who’s “died in sin.” I never understood how they defined that one—after all, people who’ve killed are allowed in.

Maybe that’s what spooks people about cemeteries. The bones and flesh, if they aren’t already dust, are on their way to becoming that. They can’t hurt anyone. Actually, that’s the reason I never felt uncomfortable when I was alone with the tombstones at night. Maybe the “voices” people claim to hear, or the specters or whatever they claim to see, escaped like bottled genies from the ones who’ve been killed by the ones whose names and dates are etched in marble or granite.

Every cemetery, as best as I can tell, covers, with a blanket of amnesia, at least one person who’s killed someone else. Of course some of the killers were themselves murdered, and a person who doesn’t kill isn’t necessarily more innocent or noble than one who does.

Under some grassy plot, under some rocky piece of ground, in a vault—somewhere—lie what remains, if anything, of Adam. Wherever it is, I know it’s not a Catholic or Jewish cemetery. For all I know, he might be in the same ground as Adolph Eichmann or Martin Bormann. Actually, I know he’s sharing the same ground with his killers: It doesn’t matter if he’s in Jerusalem or Cracow or the same state as this block. He must be; he ran from Bergen-Belsen and ended up—on this block.

I started here. Adam ended up here. Mother started and ended here. For a long time, I thought life was one of those board games you played as a kid with other kids. In some of those games, you end up some place different from where you started. In others, the idea is to get back to the start. And some players, due to an unlucky roll of the dice or draw of the cards, don’t get much past the start or always end up there.

I know what I must—or at least want—to do: get away, as soon as possible. But I had no more choice, really, about coming back today than I did about which body I had when I was born. Maybe a similar fate will determine whether I get away. I hope not.

I know I must get away—at least to continue my life and culminate my transformation. But there is no other reason why I’m obligated to move: As far as I know, there’s no law of nature or psychology that says so. Not that I know much about such things. I only know that I must, only for the vision of myself to which I’ve become acquainted, and of which I’ve learned, through some process I can’t name.

People look like they’ve been doing double-takes, but no one’s asked me. That confusion—which could aid my escape or get me killed—is also, at least in part, a matter of fate.

My name—take that back, the name I had when I lived on this block—is on a tombstone in one of the cemeteries. This is not a metaphor: I saw it on my way here. My former name, a date of birth, a date of death—whose? The former, that of the person who carried that name. The latter, the date someone calculated after the body was examined, was ID’d—by whom? August 4, 1967- June 18, 1992.

Someone—who avoided indictment for a daughter’s murder, according to some people, only through a spouse’s ability to pay—once said, “Two people know who killed her: the killer and somebody the killer confided to.” Funny, how she could’ve been talking about that person whose tombstone has my former name and my date of birth etched into it. Not only is there the confider and confidant; there is someone who knew that body was older than the person who had my old name would’ve been on the date of death. Or that he would’ve had no more reason to be on the block than I would’ve had—or so it seemed.

Stranger still, no one seem have any record or recollection of who ID’d that body, even though it wasn’t so many years ago, not really. In fact, no one’s ever said how the cops or the coroner or whoever connected—pieced together—the name and body. Was it through the wallet, the driver’s license, what? They don’t know when he showed up here, on this block, or why. And I can’t say how he ended up in the particular cemetery in which he’s buried.

And here’s something else nobody talks about openly, I’m sure (and, I’m equally sure, kids get slapped when they ask about it): They found the body, bled and bloated, on the concrete floor eight feet below the house. Lying on his side, hands zip-tied behind his back, gray duct tape over his mouth. And a clotted gash where his penis had been. That detail spread, the way any other truth somebody doesn’t want the children to know spreads through the neighborhood: by word of mouth. Except, nobody knows where the first kid who knew the story heard it.

I’m sure that she knew everything I’m recalling now. But she never said so. In fact, knowing her, I don’t know who, if anybody, she told. The lady whose name I never knew, maybe. And perhaps someone else. But not the police, I’m sure. I’ll bet she denied knowing who might’ve killed him, or his reasons for doing it.

And mother was one of those people nobody questioned—at least not openly. Nor would she question me, or anyone else, about that body in the basement. She never asked whether I was here or anywhere else near this block at the time he was killed. She didn’t have to; she just knew. And she’d’ve never told, at least anybody who’d want to know.

Some people would say she’s responsible for letting the killer get away. Not that they’d necessarily want the killer to be punished, necessarily, at least not much. A few people might’ve missed him—a few, but not many. Others who knew him probably cared about him the way his killer did.

So now mother’s going to that field out in the country, with soldiers and sailors and their wives and children. Her father’s there. I don’t know whether he was in “The War”—the one Adam mentioned —or any other. Mother didn’t talk about such things. And she won’t have to, ever. Hopefully, after she’s buried, I won’t have to either.