for anyone new to the blog, I have been serializing chapters of a novel I wrote for the past few months, and this is the last chapter. xox robin
54.
“The Sun”
The morning after that long, important night, the heat was oppressive.
Christopher woke up in the small empty lot Christina had dragged him to. Struggling, he rose from his bed of broken Coors bottles and brittle Queen Anne’s Lace. It was the time of Sunday morning when many people are up by now and “Breakfast with the Beatles” has already been on for an hour, sprung jarringly from the single speaker of Shirley’s digital radio alarm clock. Shirley lay sleeping on the brown corduroy couch in the living room, the snug slit of her mouth like a female bird’s vent.
The way anticipated moments have of getting botched up by the complicity of expectation, as though we would rather spoil our surprises and spare our fears the validation of disappointment, Christopher opened the front door that morning not to find a woman who wakes and smiles dreamily and offers to make some unnecessarily large meal, but to find a mother who reacts to fear with irritation, and who screamed when she saw her son so disgustingly beaten up and hung over and dirty, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck did you do last night? Did you get in another fight? Don’t you have any respect for me at all? I’m finally starting to believe what everyone says about you, that you’ve just turned into a monster. An irredeemable fucking nightmare.”
It was in the waiting room of the ER that Shirley finally calmed down, finally squeezed his hand and sighed, “Oh, boy. Must’ve been some night, huh?” They giggled. He thought of cynically uttering some maxim like “Boys will be boys,” the way she always did, but instead he just told her that he missed her last night, and she said she missed him too.
“I should have come straight home to you, mom.”
His nose was so completely broken, she had a hard time imagining that his face would ever heal to become again the face she’d known his whole life, the face she’d made, for herself, she’d thought at the time, when she was so young and just wanted a baby so she would have something of her own, some guaranteed love. But now she saw that she’d made his body for him, as though she knew him before he was born, and wanted to give him this perfect gift of himself, that he could use however he wanted.
But his nose looked bad. One of his eyes was swollen shut. There was a big bump on his head, and large wounds all along his skull, and he was walking stooped over, because when he stood straight, it made the cut or whatever that mess was on his stomach, hurt even worse, bleed even more. Shirley took a devastating inventory of her boy’s injuries.
“Well,” she decided to playfully ask, “Did you at least meet any girls?”
This kind of sympathy borne of love eludes me. And why should I think it could repair all the longing and the failures of words and bodies, the only tools we have? Christopher has AIDS, and so do I.
0 comments:
Post a Comment