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“I was told that my father, whom I never knew, was called God, but the name means nothing to me. Sometimes at night, when I’m feeling lonely, I call out to him with tears and form an idea of him I can love. But then it occurs to me that I don’t know him, that perhaps he’s not how I imagine, that perhaps this figure has never been the father of my soul...”
***
(Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet)
***
I.
You are on your way back from school when you meet him, tucked into the small niche made by the windowless backs of the buildings. The stones he lays on are uneven, their borders grasping clusters of weeds spilled over with what the shadow describes as dark water but which you know is blood. He clutches onto his stomach and curls up on himself like he wants to roll into nothing and disappear. It's that familiar thought stops you from scurrying away.
The man shudders and you know from the way his jaw is tense that he’s stifling a groan. You think that he’s doing a good job of staying quiet and hidden— you wouldn’t have found him if it weren’t for the bright Lamiastrum galeobdolon that hangs its yellow flowers over his hair, beckoning you closer. But then he shifts and his lip is covered in a bit of splotchy red-black and he grimaces to keep the pain deep inside and you take a step back and you turn to leave except, except...
There are footsteps coming closer, and men who sound angry. You’re not sure about some of the things they say but you know from the ball that twists in your gut and the sharpness in their eyes that they’re looking for the man under the flowers. The man shudders again but doesn’t make a noise: you can only tell because you see the flowers nod when there is no breeze. The footsteps turn the corner, draw near and you turn.
(You saw his eyes for a moment before you quickly looked the other way: maybe it was just the shade of being in the niche, or their contrast to the brilliance of the flowers, but there had been nothing in the expression of his eyes. There was a blankness there that felt like surrender, nothing but reflections that played out on a dead man yet to die.)
So when the men come up to you it isn’t difficult to fix your face into that neutral stare like you’ve practiced, and they don’t seem to consider that you’d lie or that you don’t care what they would do to you if they found out your lie. You just remember that glimpse of Nothing sunk into a living face through the splayed hands of the flowers and you act. It’s maybe the first time in a long time you let your feelings guide you, it’s maybe the first time you let yourself be genuine.
(Maybe it’s because you just remember that same look on your own face when you trembled to keep from disturbing Signor Giovanna, hid under the shelter of your bed and caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirrored door of your closet and found that you weren’t even there in the reflection: that there was a black smudge where you should be.)
The men run away. You let out one great sigh of resignation.
***
II.
You do not expect to see him again, but he steps out in front of you one day: you started taking a different route home from school to avoid the alleyway with the pretty yellow flowers so you know that it would have taken him some time to find you. But he has. It’s strange to see him upright because he’s so much bigger, making his presence known with a confidence you’ve come to wonder at, as if people could somehow feel in place in their own skin and the skin of the city.
And you take a half-step back when you meet his eyes because there is something in them that you can’t understand. Not a sharpness or a burning or dilated sedation. Not like Signor Giovanna’s hard glinty eyes or mother’s many faces. The man looks down at you with a gratefulness that is confusing in its authenticity, as if he believes it. No more dullness. You wonder how such an expression would benefit him, what trick could make someone come back from the dead. You grip the straps of your bag tighter.
(You’ve learned there are two types of people: those like Signor Giovanna who use their expressions to intimidate and those like mother who use their expressions to manipulate.)
You’re thankful that he doesn’t move any closer so you stay put and wait to be spoken to. He seems to consider your hesitance, the way you’ve sunk back into yourself as if you could be folded and tucked into your own backpack like a limp cloth. And he says
“I will never forget what you’ve done for me,”
and you don’t know what the right response is, so you stay silent and look down cautiously at his hands, not daring to meet his face and the light that’s come up in his eyes. He bows to you slightly and turns and you let out a sigh of relief when he leaves, happy that your silence has worked.
You make it back.
Today is a Friday which means that you have to be especially careful: mother is usually getting ready to go out for the night and Signor Giovanna is usually drinking. You find out that today is a bad Friday— they are both fighting when you walk in and mother runs off with a glare when she sees you. You keep your head down and walk in the quiet way you’ve learned but it isn’t enough: your head snaps up to look at Signor Giovanna’s hands because you don’t need to look at his face to know that he’s angry and you
wait...
wait...
wait... for him to slide the belt out from his pants to hit you across your arms but instead he just says:
“Bastardo, why the fuck does he care about you anyway?”
And he leaves you be. It’s the first time he’s ever spared you and you don’t know it yet, but what you have now are the last bruises you will ever get from him.
***
III.
There is a small abandoned lot that you go to when your mother and Signor Giovanna don’t want you around. It’s overgrown with tangles of weeds and the blossoms of many wildflowers, and there is a pond there in the depression that was once a building’s cellar but that’s filled up with murky water. The insects flit across the mossy stones and the dark water’s stagnant surface, the frogs would croak their low protests and the birds would trill arias to the sky that was rightfully theirs.
You could lay there and almost forget yourself, knew how to avoid your reflection in the still water and focus on the life around you, apart from you, until you forgot about you: about the hunger and the loneliness and the trajectory of the life you feel you have no control over. You wonder how long it would take...
('No thoughts,' you remind yourself and watch a beetle on the rock near your hand instead. You’re good at making yourself small, after all. You’ve learned to find peace in non-existence.)
The man watches you. You know he does— he has been, for some time, a frequent shape in the shadows of your periphery. You’ve learned how to pick his silhouette from a crowd, to catch the note of his aftershave in the breeze, the gait of his footsteps. You know that he’s somehow the reason that Signor Giovanna has stopped hitting you but you don’t know what he wants from you in return. Only his words—
("what you did for me")
—tell you that maybe he really and truly is grateful, but you’ve never done anything anyone’s thanked you for and you’ve never been convinced of anything more genuine than anger. But he doesn’t approach, so you let him watch you. Wait for him to get tired of you so that you can go back to the predictability of your life before: right now is just a breath of consciousness before the long exhale back into Nobody and Nothing.
The beetle has walked its way over your hand as you lay there. The man watches you from under the strip of shadow cast by the awning of the building next door, leaning against the stucco. Time passes and Signor Giovanna doesn’t hit you and the man is always there: close enough to see but not enough to talk to, never tiring of the nothingness that swallows your existence.
That peaceful feeling you get when you lay in your abandoned lot stays with you when you go to inhabited places and it takes you a long time to understand:
you feel safe.
***
IV.
You start to understand why your mother has begun to act so lethargically, and seems to have more and more expressions of sleepy blissfulness between her bouts of aggressive irritation. You’ve found needles in her room that she’s told you were for keeping her ears pierced, but today you saw her use them in her arms. You slip out of the house after you watch her sink into her chair with a sigh and you go back to your pond and sit down and yet feel so distant from yourself... you tremble, and your reflection is green with the pond scum.
(How long have you been here? That look of nothingness in mother’s eyes...)
There are footsteps behind you but by the time they reach you the man is already there and the sound of his approach overlaps with your knowing he’s stopped. He stands closer than he’d ever been to you and you think that if he were to touch you that you might actually start crying because, because...
But he doesn’t. He just sits down next to you, near enough that you can feel that he’s warm and that he smells only of aftershave and not cigarettes or alcohol or the heavy perfume your mother favors. He leans forward and looks at the pond but is careful not to disturb the quarrel of the sparrows at the other side of the water’s edge.
You feel like time stretches and bends but doesn’t quite break: you can’t tell how long you’ve been lost within yourself but you know that you aren’t lost because the man is there next to you, constant and warm. In the small window of your mind you reach out and clutch onto his long coat and it keeps you from being pulled back into the house with no rooms. He’s your center-of-mass and you understand without feeling because you’re still too out-of-touch with yourself that he really was genuine, that he really does protect you, that there is no expectation in his pause, no judgement in his silence.
You tremble. You stop trembling.
(You trust him.)
***
V.
The kid that calls your guardian scum drops the gun and cries but what’s called to mind is the glassy-eyed look of your mother, the way she tells you she loves you when she’s done with her needles and the way she fights with Signor Giovanna when she doesn’t return to make him supper on time or when she takes too much of the money he likes to count.
You think that the kid shouldn’t pick up a gun if he can’t decide to use it and when you realize that thought a faint smile pulls your lips.
Something happens then: a new life breathes into you, refreshingly filling your lungs and your heart. You realize that there is power in the world to change things so you aren’t just a useless spectator to your own nothing-life.
***
VI.
You learn to take what you need from those who have more than they need: you learned how to live hungry for many years, so it’s about time that you learn how to feed yourself. For once you feel like your mother has helped you with something: it’s easy to know how to get people to do what you want when you’ve watched your mother change the tone of her voice, the light in her eyes, do-up her hair and paint on a pretty face—
people who didn’t live hungry didn’t know that not everyone was genuine.
***
VII.
You are sent away to live on campus; somehow, you’ve won a scholarship. You know that it has something to do with your guardian angel and not any merit that the school or the teachers who turned a blind eye to your bruises and bullying. You’re grateful to be away from Signor Giovanna, from your addicted mother, from the desperation of that household— you have a plan now and you have much farther to go before you get there.
You wish you could tell him—
(You give me hope. You have saved me from the abyss that opened inside of myself, saved me from the lowlife I was going to become if the tides carried me any further. You have refreshed my soul, found in me a dream that was in the stone of my youth as Haruno...)
—thank you.
***
VIII.
The last time you see him lingering in the shadows you are sitting in your abandoned lot, looking at your pond and you find it: a package in the weeds. You look over and he’s there, tipping his hat before sinking back into the maze of streets.
(You’ve never gotten a gift before.)
Your hair is turning blond and you’ve noticed that if you focus on the flowers around you long enough that they grow tall enough to surround you. You’ve picked up a pebble and sent it flying into the air as a ladybug to land on you guardian who watches you with a smile in wonder. You are sure that your dreams are attainable.
The man gives you a pin painted like a ladybug and you know that he believes in you too.
***
IX.
You test your ability in the empty lot every day. You haven’t seen your guardian (your Papa) in several weeks and it’s beginning to spoil your focus, without his warmth and his steady presence leaning against the building next door. You want him to see that you’ve not stopped wearing his ladybug pins and you want to somehow tell him
thank you, thank you, thank you.
You don’t ever get to.
He’s on his side next to the pond, his hand uncurled on the grass and the weeds cover his hair with colour and shade. There’s no one else around and he’s already cool to the touch, and there is a trickle of red that slips into the stagnant green of the water he lays beside. You feel like you’ve been thrown from your own body when you approach, as if you are seeing you from another person and you approach the stillness of the only person you trust curled up into the Nothingness he saved you from.
His eyes are still open and you tremble at their blankness. You’d come to know his expression as something of love when he looked upon you, but there is Nothing now. The smell of his aftershave is already mingled with that of the earth and the floral reverie of the abandoned lot.
A light surrounds you both when you lay down next to him and you let your trembles turn to tears for the first time in fourteen years... and it’s overwhelming, the amount of grief that you can squeeze from your eyes. You wonder if this will ever end or if you will drown in a pool of your own making... but then the breeze makes the wildflowers tremble on their stems and you shudder and you feel like you are being embraced by something fainter but warmer than the air, that the ghost of the man in front of you is infused in the very light of day.
The man never leaves your side: the spirit that hugs you has his comfort, that vento aureo that has refreshed your heart and soul.
***
X.
“I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me,”
you tell him, and you somehow know that he can hear.
You sit up in the abandoned lot and look at the pond one last time, and you scatter its still surface with a body’s worth of petals in all the shapes of flowers you love and you feel that he’s still just over your shoulder watching.
***