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.

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.

60. Without Witness

One of the first things you learn on this block is that you didn’t see. If anybody asks you what you saw, you didn’t. And if you’re asked what you know, you don’t.

Still, the stories—At least some of them are true, or all of them have some truth!—still, the stories go around. Even through all of the years I’ve been away, I’ve heard the stories.

Especially the one about the body in the basement. It startles—but actually doesn’t surprise—me that someone actually talked to the police. Or so I heard. Nobody’ll ever say who talked, or if anybody did. But they’ll all tell you that somebody left that house at three, three-thirty, four in the afternoon—nobody’s really sure of the exact hour.

And who might that person who left the house ‘ve been? Five foot seven, five foot eight, five foot nine. Not slender, but not quite stocky. Straight hair—everyone agrees on that—very straight, combed down past the ears, maybe to the shoulders. Blonde, reddish blonde, red, maybe even streaked. But definitely straight, and turned inward at the end—at the earlobes, at the collar or just past it. Straight, and hardly a strand rustled or tousled. As if that person combed or brushed it, carefully, before coming up from the cellar.

Things get really bizarre when people describe the clothes. Jeans, T-shirts and sneakers, they say, but that could describe the attire of any number of people standing or passing through this block at any given time. No colors, at least not from those witnesses. But somenone else saw a “long, dark coat”, which would’ve been strange, even though the day was unusually chilly for the time of year. Someone else saw a “smock;” still another self-proclaimed winess saw a “dress, light on top and dark on bottom.” Should I be surprised that someone else identified a skirt and a blouse or a top. But nothing more specific.

And the shoes: Things get even stranger here. Everything from candy-apple red stiletto pumps to running shoes. Ballet flats and combat boots, too. Even bare or stocking feet weren’t excluded. That would make that person tougher than me: I couldn’t go shoeless on broken concrete!

As for the identities of those self-proclaimed witnesses, I couldn’t say. I doubt Mrs. Litttington was one: After all, as far as I know, she hadn’t returned to this block from the day she moved away until today. The other people who might’ve remembered me are also gone, except for the woman whose name I never knew. There’re only two who’d’ve remembered my name or the person, the body, to which it was attached. One is dead now. Yes, mother.

And yes, I can keep a secret. It’s easy when there’s no one you can tell. Well, you know, that’s the only way a secret is ever kept. There was—is—mother. And the lady whose name I never knew, who’s here now and whose gray-on-blue eyes glance occasionally in my direction. She sees; does she know? She’d never say, except to mother. And for once, I hope that the one thing I’ve always said about this block—“Nothing Changes”—doesn’t change.

That, I know, is something lots of people say about wherever they’ve lived. People move away, die; things are built; other things fall down. But nothing changes, they say. You always recognize the place, no matter how long you’ve been away. And, like they tell you, you can’t get away from it.

Door squeaks. Who’s there? Man, in blue jacket—uniform! Oh—relief—it’s not one of them! Just a funeral home worker, a gardener or maintenance man. Maybe a security guard. It’s all right. They can’t bother me, I don’t think. I’m here, seeing mother, and I’m even in black. What would they know, anyway? Then again—They’re on this block. Nobody knows and everybody tells and everybody knows and nobody tells Even so, I’d guess—hope—they haven’t heard.

Then again, I have to wonder: Who would they believe anyway, if anybody? Why should they believe me?

Truth is, nobody will, at least not totally. Nobody does. But they don’t totally believe anybody else, not even mother. And she’s the most truthful person I’ve ever known; still is. And she’s believed—or at least never questioned—anything I’ve told her, at least not since I left.

That guy’s left, the door squeaking behind him, just like he came in. I always thought funeral homes were supposed to be quiet. I must admit, it was, at least until that guy came in and did whatever he did. Still, you’d think a funeral home director or somebody’d think of a detail like a door.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, he’s on this block, though I don’t think he’s lived here. It figures, though—the cops didn’t notice the door was missing from the basement when they got there. It’d been nailed shut and boarded over before the body was discovered. It squeaked—at least it did, way back when I lived here.–like no other door, at least none I’ve seen lately.: a full-throated squeal from old brass hinges. And from the looks of things, nobody’d fixed it or anything else on that house, ever since the last occupants moved out and someone sealed it shut—or thought that’s what he or she’d done.

I would imagine that it squeaked when the man who would die on the other side of it opened it—unless he somehow completely knocked it out of its well. Still, it’d’ve made some kind of noise, whether from the yielding of the boards or the blows to them. Nobody mentioned it—at least from what I heard. Nobody heard anything coming or going, or even from the man before his wrirsts and lips were bound by strips of tape.

Mother didn’t tell me that part of the story. At least, I don’t remember that she did. I;m not really sure of what I did or didn’t hear from her, at least about that man and that house. That’s what happens on this block. When you hear, you don’t recall who told you, or whether anybody did. Just like you don’t remember who molested you and left you teetering between the fears of the consequences of being believed, or not. You can’t revisit it or recount it until one day, perhaps, when it rises from the rumbles that’ve muttered in your sleep and echo like stutters.

What was that? Another noise; I jump. Who else’d come to this funeral? Who will? Would they?

Pretend you didn’t see. No, don’t pretend. You didn’t. Nobody came in the door this time. You heard. Or did you? No one else did, or seemed to. No one else in this room flinched. And they didn’t seem to notice that I did.

All right, they didn’t. So I didn’t, either. No—there it is again. The squeal of that door hinge, low and almost croaky, perching into a higher-pitched squeak, echoed through the plywood boards. That noise—nothing drives me crazier! Well, not many things do. And nobody ever hears them.

That’s the only time people can agree: when they didn’t see or hear something. Like the ones who saw only jeans and a T-shirt or “long” hair. How would they know about the door?

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.