| Sic Transit... by Arthur Edelstein |
| My sister says she has something to confess to me. I move the phone away from my ear, breath in and out once, replace it at my ear. I have something to confess too, I tell her. Perfect, she says, we’ll work it together, like brother and sister. No, I tell her, drop it on your doctor. She doesn’t have one, she says, except for the kids. Then lay it on your pediatrician, I say, and I drop the instrument into its cradle, abandon her to the vast imbecile murmur of the telephone lines as they sail across the nation, post to post, transformer to transformer. Domine dirige nos. Before she can phone again, I am on the street, stepping away, properly attired, dark suit, white collar. But where, oh Lord, am I going? The trees are barely beginning to bud, the air cool but not cold. It is April, the cruelest month. Today I will wander. Approaching me is the mail carrier, his sack of mutterings hanging heavily from his shoulder. He too is properly attired, grey pants and jacket. But no cap; they used to wear them. As we pass one another, he nods, I nod. We are for the moment kindred, walkers in the world. And in the near distance a two wheeler, its rider up off the seat, pumping hard, the bike rocking from side to side. As he rolls by me, it’s Robbie Bierce I see. He is careful not to notice me, and surely he’s done something he thinks I think is wrong. Whenever he sits on the other side of the cloth, mumbling his petty awfulnesses through it, his lies and masturbations—the joys of which I surely enhance for him by playing my silent role of disapprobation—can he really believe me unaware of his identity? Oh, that game of anonymity we play, all of us, even old Theodore, who manifests a different voice each time. Thus I refute you, he thinks. And thus, of course, do I know him, old Theodore, man of a hundred creaking Theodorean voices, who has once again sneaked a drink of the hard stuff he promised never more to lay tongue to. Go, I tell him, for penance perform a miracle, and throw in a couple of hail Marys for good measure. And I can see him soaring back to his boarding house, above the rooftops, buzzing unwary pedestrians, making a good hot 80 proof flight of it, ad magorem Dei gloriam. Theodore aloft, soon to be a major motion picture. For a moment, my image walks beside me in the polished surface of a parked car, torso foreshortened, squat. Severed head gliding across the window. I turn from it, and, walking faster, attempt to perform a meditation upon that far and long ago hillside, but I find myself once again invisible listener in the darkness. “Father, I have done murder,” says the voice. “You’ve…Yes, tell me,” I say. Pause. “A terrible thing,” he says. What was the matter with me that I could do such a terrible thing?” And I am on the street again, catching cartoons of myself in the sides of cars, approaching the subway, hearing the fading tones of that voice, terrible thing, terrible thing. My voice, mine, my very own. I deposit my token, push through the turnstile and descend the hard steps to the platform, walk to its middle and lean against the tiled wall. I am a middle-man, yes. My mission. My calling. A transmitter of sins. Or so it seemed once. But now only a receptacle, an overflowing can, nowhere to send the stuff. I am full of it. Overrunning. Sin, sin, sin… Near me, a woman stands beside a stanchion, reading her newspaper. She is middle-aged, like me. Her face is pleasant. She is a bit overweight. When she turns a page, her paper crackles like small fires. If I had taken the road not taken, perhaps I’d know her, maybe we’d be married, have 2.4 children. She’d be headed where now? Possibly to visit her sister, her older sister, recently divorced, a nice settlement and custody of her own 2.4. Bits of paper on the platform flutter and waft as the train comes rocking in. The doors slide open hissing like an insistent voice, and as I step aboard, the woman, entering next to me, whispers. “I’ll be home by five, dear.” I turn to her and she is headed to the back of the car, her paper tucked neatly under her arm. I lose and catch my balance as the train starts, and I stagger-walk toward the front, drop into a seat, swing my legs in. Dear, is it? Dear? Oh, I have fallen among strangers, lost my way. No more the alabaster columns. Othellos’ occupation’s gone. I slip the book from my side pocket, open to the place marker, and read, backing up several lines to orient myself. ‘O now for ever, Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content! Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars that…’ Somebody sits down beside me and I compact myself to make room, then back to the text, my only escape, texts. ‘And O ye mortal engines whose rude throats th’ immortal Jove’s dread clamors counterfeit, Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone!’ As I read, I sense that I am no longer alone in this text. My neighbor reads too, over my shoulder, as it were. And I am invaded; he inhabits my consciousness. As I imagine Jove’s dread clamors, so too does he conjure those clamors. Or so it seems. I no longer possess the privacy of my own mind. I am being jostled there by a stranger. I close the book and he looks back into space, no longer in my head. “Here,” I say, placing the book in his lap. “Start at the beginning and read it through.” And I watch his 20 year old pock marked face register astonishment and then annoyance, as though I have taken, not given. “It may change your life,” I tell him. “But don’t count on it.” Then I rise and do my stagger-step again, passing myself along from seat handle to post and on through the connecting passage into the next car, where I seat myself beside an elderly black woman with a great bundle on her lap. How aloof we are from one another in this populous world of travel. If it were a party, I would surely speak to her, tell her my name, ask hers. Where are you from, I would ask. How do you like it here in our bustling city? Me? Oh, yes, I am in the calling that you see upon me. No no, just call me Jim. Bedford Avenue slides in and the doors do their thing. Several people enter and quickly distance themselves from the muttering bearded man in a threadbare grey suit who has entered with them. He seats himself across the aisle from me, clutching his brown paper bag to his chest and I grant him absolution as the train jerks into motion. Around the car I run my gaze, Te absolve, te absolve, and I save them all, how simple it is now. How hopeless. Greybeard sucks a slug from his bottle, belches, and says, “Fullashit, alluvya.” He rolls his head from side to side and when he spots me he stares. “Blugh,” he says, “blugh.” He rocks back and forth. You can do better than that, you old wreck, I think. And he goes for broke—bastard, stinking balls of a dead horse, bag a piss…. He has read my thought, this bottle sucker. A mind reader; how can I ignore him. I lean forward, hold out my palms and he stops, confused, what’s this guy up to. “We can’t communicate,” I tell him, “if you make ad hominem attacks.” Red-eyed, he stares at me, chews his lower lip. “What’s eating you,” I ask. “Let’s have it.” “Tsavit,” he says. We stare at each other, the train rocks onward, the other passengers sink back into their trances, the planet Earth rolls through space. “Okay,” I tell him. “Job trouble.” “Job trouble,” he says, and goes back to his lip chewing, eye blinking mutter. I sit back and cross my legs. Right on, I think. The nail on the head. And I begin to feel fear. Not of him; he’s harmless really. Fear that we’re the same, he and I. Worse; he has his juice to give him meaning. Something to quest for, to covet. At the center of his chaos, the bright bottle. In vino veritas. He watches me, his head dancing with the pulse of the train. Several teen-agers pass between us, their club jackets resplendent in gold and red. The Stingers. “Fulla,” says grey-threads, as though they have touched his on switch. “Yes,” I tell him, “you’re onto me. Fulla.” I lean forward. “So here’s the story. I’m a fraud, an empty vessel. Dull story, but I’m compelled to tell it.” The train clatters along, into its future, and I recount to him the tale of my past, my lost sense of mission. I am a rogue priest, I tell him. No, I am less than that. “And you, I can see, are the one who will say the word, grant me relief.” I am all gut now, a string drawn taut. I tell him I have watched patrols come in from the jungle, carrying their dead, soon to be mere offal, garbage, but that did not dilute my commitment, that the dullness of all those confessions I heard, they couldn’t touch it. Not even the vibrations of desire I have felt in the presence of certain parishioners. Oh those glimpses of pinkish thigh. Skin like caramel. What, then what is the explanation? I ask you? He leans toward me, his eyes on fire. And his head rolls forward onto his chest. He is asleep. My seat partner shifts the sack from one side of her lap to the other. “Don wake dot mon,” she says. “What you done got be toy fever, mon.” She throws up one hand and waves it as if she wants to be called on. Obliging, I nod. She shakes her head, her eyes almost closed. “Takin off dot playsuit’ gentlemon. You got no truck weeth dot no more.” She looks away from me, and louder, “I gotten me a second dere?” “Second.” A voice from the far end of the car. Its owner stands, takes off his glasses, wipes them with a small red cloth, slides them into the handkerchief pocket of his dark pin-striped suit, and waits for the microphone being rushed to him by the white-haired master of ceremonies who bounds along the aisle slightly crouched and thrusts the instrument in front of the speaker. Breathlessly, the MC says, “Yes, go on,” and turns up the palm of his free hand. “I’m telling you for your own good, sonny boy,” the little guy says, ‘you got to stop it dis Father business. Sonny McCasney, dat’s more like it.” On hearing my name, I stand, then sit again. “Or you could consider maybe being Rabbi McCasney? Don’t answer,” he continues, “a rhetorical question only.” At that, the white haired guy turns toward me, looks down to the floor, his eyes narrowed in concentration. Having found there what he was seeking, he lifts his face toward me, eyes wide, brow wrinkled. His expression says, boy have I got a question for you. “Forgive me Father,” he says, “but would that be such a transgression, to slip off the collar and on with the yarmulke?” The palm is up again, and he leans in my direction. I clear my throat and he runs at me with the mike. “What’s going on?” I ask. “You look like…” The train lurches and grinds rapidly to a stop. The doors slide open and a half dozen or so get on. No one gets off. The newcomers seat themselves and all of them raise their hands as the train starts into motion. And Whitey, of course hustles over to one of them, a young woman in wide diameter glasses, librarian for sure. “The question is irrelevant,” she says, and settles back in her seat. “What about that?” Whitey says to the other passengers. But before he can get a response, the scene dissolves and a voice says, “The Donahue show will return after some brief messages.” A black man in dark glasses reaches for a can of Coke. He drinks briefly and puts the can down. “All right,” he says, “who’s the wise guy?” Several wise guys stand up and pantomime different ways of perishing, and a camera focuses on a listing in the yellow Pages: Die Casting. Then a man with a wrench: “Nobody beats Midas, nobody!” “Except maybe General Norman Schwartskopf? I do not, I am hoping, use his name in vain?” It is pinstripe again, speaking into the proffered mike. At mention of the general, the passengers bow their heads and delve into pockets, purses, paper bags, and draw out their frayed yellow ribbons, which they display to each other in proof of unquestioning piety. It has been several years since the General did his thing in the Gulf, but the parades, celebrations, welcome-homes have become a national habit and yellow ribbons the currency of national identification. Since I have no ribbon, I sink my head in silent prayer and hope for the best.
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