Misdeeds, Dimly Recalled

He is a bad person, he knows this. It’s evident from the looks he gets on the street, from the whispers and condescending sniffs. The open disdain with which people treat him doesn’t escape his notice, for a wonder. It’s one of the few social cues capable of permeating the permanent fogbank that clouds his cognitions these days.

If only he could remember why. But his recollections are fuzzy at best. Blame the divot in his skull for that. As for what’s to blame for that phrenological development, anyone’s guess is better than his. It’s connected, he knows that much. It’s also the reason he can’t hold down a job that requires even minimal focus. Concentrating for more than a few minutes at a pop manifests a blinding headache. Few such jobs exist, and even fewer that would hire someone like him. He spends most days on the back stoop of his apartment building and collects his welfare check and dirty looks.

The girl from the house on the corner opens her front door and follows her dog down the steps for their afternoon walk. The pooch, a yippy teacup poodle, leads the way, its leash a lank parabola trailing from its collar to its master’s porcelain hand. The hand and the girl to whom it belongs delicate things, such delicate things. She mustn’t be a day over twelve. He sits on the back stoop and his eyes glaze over and track her progress around the block and out of sight.

On Tuesday he has an appointment to which he arrives late and for which he earns yet another dirty look and a reprimand to boot from his caseworker. When the talking-to is over the tidy, sniveling little fellow sits back in his chair and tugs at the cuffs of his shirtsleeves. He dons his I’m invested in your life expression and having made this mental switch adapts his posture to reflect it. Now he leans forward in his chair and rests his elbows on the desk, fingers interlaced before him. “So, how’s the job search coming?”

He stares back mutely, dimly, enveloped in brain fog.

“No news on that front, I take it.”

He shakes his head.

The caseworker tsks and jots a note on his legal pad. “You’re going to have to try harder, Ed.”

“I been trying,” Ed says. “Nobody wants me.”

A flicker of distaste crosses the man’s narrow face, of schadenfreude. Not a word Ed could recall even if he wanted to.

“That’s not good enough,” the caseworker says. “The terms call for employment, not excuses. Have you considered house-painting? Well, maybe not house-painting. Painting office buildings, maybe. Warehouses, that sort of thing. And I happen to know that the chicken plants are always looking for line workers.”

Ed stares at him blankly.

“Put in an application at the chicken plants this week, at the very least.”

Ed nods.

“And how are your migraines?”

“Um.” He can feel one coming on right now. Its aura dances at the corner of his vision, exquisite pain radiating from the divot in his skull down his neck. Sweat beads on his brow; the caseworker must see how pale and drawn his face grows. He shrugs. “Same old.”

Another flicker of satisfaction, as if in acknowledgement that his suffering is well deserved. Quickly masked. “Yes, well. Talk to your therapist about that. Maybe he can refer you to someone who can prescribe triptans, help clear those up.” He seems ambivalent about the prospect.

Will triptans fix the dent in my skull? Ed thinks. Will they scratch this infernal itch? He wishes for a magic pill that could, but even in his damaged state he knows no such medicine exists. He promises to apply at the chicken plant and hands over his restricted-access phone to endure the minor humiliation of having his caseworker enter his next weekly appointment into its electronic calendar so he doesn’t forget.

He takes the bus home.

The girl and her dog are coming out of her house when he gets off at the bus stop on the corner. He glances away but before he can she catches his eye and smiles sweetly and favors him with a wave. Ed doesn’t smile, doesn’t wave back. He lowers his gaze and beelines for the grated door of his tenement building.

In his shitty seventh-story shoebox with its cigarette smoke-stained walls and foldout bed and ancient window whose paper-thin pane and rusted-shut latch defy opening though he has often considered trying of late he draws the shades and sits in the dark and clutches his head in his hands. The world swims and sweat beads on his face and spills between his fingers, tears too.

He despairs of his brokenness. He hates himself. As the migraine intensifies he sickens and stumbles across the room to the tiny bathroom that is, in the most literal sense, a water closet. There he kneels before the toilet and throws up. Amid the storm of throbbing, all-consuming pain, an island of clarity. He remembers, dimly, why he hates himself. Bits and pieces of the episode that rendered him invalid, the shameful predilections that precipitated it. Urges that have survived even the divot, the brain damage. Would that his injury had rendered him a eunuch!

Once he cleans himself up he fills out an application for the minimum-wage job on the production line at the chicken plant. Far cry from his former position at the post office, but what are you gonna do. Prospects are slim to nonexistent. By the time he finishes filling out the app he can feel another migraine coming on. He crosses to the foldout bed and lowers it and collapses onto the too-springy mattress as the aura shimmers across his field of vision. After a time, he falls asleep.

Trench coat. Something about a trench coat. Trench coat, billy club, a postal route he never asked for. Temptation.

He wakes and the pieces of the dream shatter and crumble away to nothing, unsorted. He doesn’t dream how he used to before the injury. It’s as if his mishappen brain can no longer find the throughline that gives dreams some semblance of plot, however nonsensical. His come in fits and starts, disparate puzzle pieces that never quite add up to anything approaching coherence.

The following Tuesday he has another meeting with his caseworker.

“Sit down, Ed.”

Ed sits.

“How’s the job search coming? Did you submit that application to the chicken plant like we talked about?”

Ed nods.

“Good, good. And?”

“Haven’t heard back.”

“I see.” The case worker tsks, clicks his pen, jots a note. “Well, give it time. Not too much time, mind, but keep your phone on.”

“Sure.”

“Anything else you’d like to talk about today?”

He thinks about it, casts his mind back. Something scratches at the threshold of consciousness. A worrisome backslide. Disturbing dreams, disturbing notions. The tangled neurons of his mushed cerebellum fire and misfire, fizzle. “No. I’m good.”

The bus squeals to a halt before his stop and the folding doors open with a hiss like an exhalation of breath. He makes his way to the front of the bus, careful not to brush against any of the legs that protrude into the aisle. He nods to the bus driver and the driver gives the slightest declination of his head and looks away as he gets off.

The girl sits on her stoop with the dog’s leash looped around her pale, thin wrist. On the sidewalk before her the dog roams as far as the tether will allow. Muzzle to the ground, studying sign of humans’ and canines’ passage. It sniffs to the end of its leash in one direction, turns a tight circle, and sniffs back the other way. The way its young master lets the leash dangle between her fingers is reminiscent of a cigarette and he wonders if she’s ever smoked one and thinks that if she hasn’t yet, she soon will. She will take to smoking and drinking and other such violations of innocence and she will belong to the world.

He crosses the street and she looks up and smiles her shy smile and instead of shying away this time he returns it. The street is empty but for them and from an upper floor of the neighboring apartment building Spanish radio spills out an open window onto the early-autumn air. The poodle stops pacing as he approaches and raises its muzzle to him and sniffs. He extends his hand to let it get his scent. His heart pounds and sweat springs from the pores of his neck and groin and underarms. He asks what the dog’s name is.

“Frankie,” she says. “He’s a busybody. See?” As if to illustrate this, the poodle resumes pacing. At the end of its first lap it fixes on an alluring scent and barrels forward, snout aimed at the base of the mailbox on the corner. The leash goes taut. The girl snaps it like reins and the pup looks back, affronted. It glances once, wistfully, at the mailbox and slinks back to the stoop and its master. “Good Frankie,” she says, and looks up at him. “Do you have a dog?”

He thinks. “Not a dog, no.”

“Oh.”

“Something better.”

Her light brown eyes shine with piqued interest.

“Would you like to see?”

“Can I?”

He glances around. The street is empty. “Put the dog up first.”

She lets the dog inside and coils the leash around her hand and stuffs it into her jacket pocket. The jacket is a red quilted puffer the hood of which is down and her sleek black hair spills into it like a cascade of ink. She looks up at him, expectant.

Before he knows what he’s doing he invites her inside and lo and behold she says yes. So he leads her inside, so shocked and excited and scared by this that he doesn’t think to wonder why. Why does she follow him up all seven floors, flight after graffitied flight of stairs? Why doesn’t she turn back when he tells her the elevator is broken? Why not when he opens the door to his apartment and she regards the desolate scene of court-imposed bachelorhood therein?

Hasn’t anyone told her?

Almost he hopes to run into someone in the stairwell, in the hall outside his apartment. Dimly he wishes to cross paths with the same neighbors with whom he has had as few dealings as possible since the humiliating ritual of their introduction. But most of the other tenants are at work or vegetating in a drug-addled state within their respective units and unlikely to notice their passage let alone think much of it. When he first moved in he went around introducing himself to everyone on his floor and though most gave him the stink-eye no one’s bothered him since. They keep to themselves.

He shuts the door behind them and turns the lock on the knob and runs the deadbolt and, as she peers into the dim corners of the room with the first hint of trepidation on her porcelain features, hooks the chain.

The trouble started with the postal route. He knows this much. Before, as mail handler, he was safe, isolated among the heaps of envelopes and parcels in a back room of the post office. It’s when they made him carrier, gave him a satchel and keys to a mail truck and a forward-facing position, that the itch grew too intense not to scratch. And then—and then. The rest, like his dreams, is indistinct. Bits and bobs of fragmented memory. A school bus pulling up to a stop, its red octagonal sign swinging outwards. Moony faces of children in the windows. Flashes of trenchcoated flashers flashing. The satchel slung across his shoulder leaping at his hip. Mail spilling everywhere as he sprints through backyards thinking: I should have ditched the bag, I should have ditched the bag. I should never have accepted this job. I should never have been born.

Mail theft is a felony, exposing oneself to a bus full of grade schoolers a worse one. The deliverance of justice is swift. A cop from the neighborhood happens to be heading home right then and catches sight of the fleeing trenchcoated mailman and the busload of horrified children and, putting two and two together, gives chase.

The pursuit doesn’t last long. He crashes through shrubbery, through sandboxes, past swing-sets and trampolines and slides. He’s almost home free when a clothesline arrests his momentum, steals the air from his lungs, nearly decapitates him. Shortly his pursuer catches up and finds his perp bare-assed and wheezing on the ground with his mail satchel and trench coat hung up in a hydrangea bush. The cop goes to work with his baton, with his boots. Overzealous, they say later. Administrative leave. Inadmissible. But can you blame him? His kid was on that bus. Now take the brain damage and terms of release and get out of this courtroom, you sick freak. Better than you deserve.

His name goes on a list.

“Mister?”

He returns to himself. Spurts of memory swirl and vacate his mind like water down a drain. His head throbs. Flashes and zigzags herald the onset of a killer migraine. The girl eyes him a touch uneasily now. “It’s in the back room there,” he says. “Go on, have a look. I need to use the bathroom.”

He enters the bathroom and shuts himself in. Maybe she won’t be there when he comes out. Maybe they can forget this minor episode altogether. Flush it from memory and the urge with it. He stares at himself in the chipped and cracked bathroom mirror and despises the man who stares back at him. The divot and the bald spot where the hair died and never quite grew back. His head pounds and he remembers and wishes he could be fixed. A chemical solution, or one more immediate.

He opens the bathroom door.

“I don’t see any animals back here,” says the girl from the rear of the apartment.

“No,” he says. “Just me. Go home now.”

She turns to go, confusion morphing into alarm as she catches sight of his face. “Are you okay, mister? You look terrible.”

“Hasn’t anyone told you it’s rude to say stuff like that?” he snaps. “Go home. And make sure you use the door at the back of the building.”

She rushes from the apartment.

He goes to the window and drags open the shades. The street seven stories below is quiet. It is early afternoon, soon enough for kids to be off school but too early for most people to get off work. She will be about halfway down the stairs now and by the time she gets home it will occur to her how strange this encounter was and once her parents return she will tell someone about it and about him and that will be that. No better than he deserves.

He wrenches the latch free of its bed of rust and throws open the window. A network of hairline fractures materializes in the pane and spreads as the window arcs outward and raps against the building’s brick exterior. Sunlight invades the room and fragments and the aura swims in his vision and the blinding light of both refract in the tear-filled orbs of his eyes.

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