Damn knee is hurting. Forgot my cane.
Sixteen hours! And all I’d managed to write were those terse—enigmatically terse?—chapters “Ever After” (will someone out there take note of this precisely honed single declarative sentence?)—“Nine-Year-Old Suspect in Sister’s Death” (originally, this was twenty-seven pages of halting prose)—“Necropolis” (Morris Kruk’s abrasive voice ringing in my ears)—“Promise!” (Mummy’s terrifying voice that has burrowed into the marrow of my bones) and—beyond this—utter mental/spiritual collapse.
What you are trying to speak, is unspeakable.
To look upon Death. The very face of Death. Unspeakable.
Through hundreds—thousands?—of pages I’d believed that the sheer rush of writing, the momentum of language would bring me to Bliss’s death which this time I would see. Unflinching, unshrinking and courageous I would see whose hands seized the sleeping child in her bed and taped her mouth before she could scream and taped together her wrists and her ankles and bore her downstairs to the basement and into the furnace room, and what happened there, what was caused to happen, by someone known to Bliss and to me or by an outsider who’d entered the house in the night with the intention of abducting (?)/raping (?)/murdering (?) my sister; I would see at last how over the tightly wrapped duct tape the (badly wrinkled) crimson silk scarf was tied, binding Bliss’s wrists above her head as in a “seductive” pose; I would see whose hands struggled with Bliss to force her down onto the smutty floor behind the furnace (to be precise, behind the furnace to the left as you entered the furnace room: for two furnaces were required to heat the Rampikes’ large, sprawling house and it was behind the farther of the two that Bliss’s body would be discovered); I would see whose hands seized Bliss’s unprotected head, struck her head against the concrete wall, once, twice, three times heedless of the child’s terror, and yet another time, and another (as Dr. Elyse would estimate, Bliss’s head had been struck against the concrete wall no less than five times and perhaps as many as seven times) though almost at once the child’s fragile skull had been fractured, the very bone shattered, bloody clumps of brain leaking into her hair. All this I was meant to see, and so I would know. But I didn’t know.
Skyler! what have you done to your sister
Where have you taken Bliss? Skyler you must tell Mummy
Crossing Pitts at Livingstone, and onto Livingstone where in the excavation pit men in hard hats were working, how strange was this? Past 8 P.M.? And when had it snowed? Blinding-white snow phony-looking as Styrofoam.
Something was wrong. Must’ve been in Skyler’s head.
No one must know Skyler
Mummy and Daddy will protect you
HUBCAP-SIZED GLOWING DISC OF A CLOCK ON THE WALL ABOVE THE FRONT entrance of the 7-Eleven store. I was staring trying to comprehend the time: long black hand poised at one, short stubby hand at eight.
This was a neighborhood store where the Indian clerk had come to recognize me. He was a youngish gentlemanly India-born individual wary-eyed, prim-mouthed, unfailingly courteous. He had no idea of my name but he had some idea of my face. For it is not possible to totally hide your face in public, in the United States. And seeing something more than usually gnarled and frantic in my face had made the clerk alert, though still smiling.
“Is it—night? Or morning?”
My question was too urgent to be playful. The Indian clerk smiled uncertainly.
“Morning.”
Morning! Somehow I’d lost a day. (Or, I’d lost a night.)
This 7-Eleven store had been hit by young guys with weapons, kids as young as fourteen. Another clerk, very likely a relative of this man, had been assaulted a few weeks ago, hospitalized. Now came Skyler Rampike limping into the store, panting and agitated-seeming in a grungy jacket with its hood hiding much of his freaky Caucasian face. And his hands are shaky.
No way for this Indian gentleman (should’ve been a dentist, doctor, engineer but instead he managed a 7-Eleven in a run-down neighborhood of New Brunswick working twelve-hour shifts to assure that his children will graduate from Princeton summa cum laude) to know if this shaky Caucasian kid is high on drugs (has to be crystal meth) or more generally a mental case confusing morning for night, night for morning. Or maybe I’m an eccentric individual, could be a grad student, dropout, or genius, of the kind that exist at the margins of a university like lone rogue elephants at a distance from the elephant herd.
Meaning to be friendly here’s Skyler embarked upon a nervous riff: “Excuse me but I hope, sir, you are more protected than you appear to be, I see the surveillance camera aimed at me but I hope you’ve got a baseball bat—at least!—hidden beneath the counter. Like, if somebody tries to rob you again. And it will probably happen, the hours you keep, late-night or morning, and the drug users out there, of which please don’t think that I am one, I am not. You—I assume this is a family-owned business?—or are these 7-Elevens ‘franchises’?—you people deserve better than…A hell of a lot better than…” But Skyler isn’t sure what he is saying. Or why he has become so emotional suddenly. Embarrassing and upsetting the gentlemanly Indian clerk who has no idea how to reply.
And then, I wasn’t sure if I had actually spoken these words aloud or whether like a text-message the words had come into my head in silence and had passed out of my head in silence.
And you must never speak of this Skyler
Not even to Jesus
By this time, I’d located what I had come into the store to buy. Brought the items to the counter where the clerk waited with his wary polite smile. “Anything else, sir? Cigarettes?”
Sir! Yet the clerk meant no mockery, it seemed.
“Thanks, no.”
It has to be registered as strange: the twitchy-freaky Caucasian kid with insomniac eyes and charmless beard-stubble wasn’t purchasing his usual bargain junk food and six-pack of diet soda laced with caffeine like strychnine but a five-ounce can of Hercules Lighter Fluid and a single (small-sized) box of Five Star Kitchen Matches.
WHICH PURCHASES BY THE YOUNG MAN TO BE IDENTIFIED AS SKYLER RAMPIKE, nineteen, of Pitts Street, New Brunswick, would acquire what a philosopher defines as significant meaning only if said young man uses them to some significant purpose, that very morning.
THIS SCRUBBY PARK WHERE THE PREVIOUS SPRING SKYLER RAMPIKE WAS taken rudely, by force, into New Brunswick police custody in what the media call a “drug sweep.” Junkies (scruffy-Caucasian, black), dealers (black), hookers (mixed-race), pimps (black). And Skyler Rampike formerly of Fair Hills, New Jersey.
Yet Raritan Park was my park. Had to be. And now that I understood that it wasn’t twilight but morning, I was feeling much more hopeful. The episode in the 7-Eleven had been a good thing.
If your life is a movie—or even if it isn’t—you can “deconstruct” it into episodes: “scenes.” And you can analyze these “scenes” in retrospect, deriving meaning from them that was not apparent when you lived them; meaning that, a philosopher of mind might contend, does not exist until you analyze it, in coherent language.
“Hey man: you lookin’ to score?”
No! Not me.
A few yards farther on the muddy path: “Man you lookin’ to score?”—more belligerent this time.
No! Not right now.
Has to be a sick-yearning look in my eyes, my clenched mouth, anyone can see that I’ve come to this place desperate to score. But no.
“I’ll kill myself first. That’s a promise.”
Walking/limping away. Damned hard to retreat with dignity when you fucking limp. On the cracked-concrete walkway beside the Raritan River in this somber New Jersey light, looking like molten lead. Snow has begun to fall, soft damp clots like miniature blossoms. Snow melting on the concrete, and in the river. The wind is raw and gusty and tastes of metal and yet “rot”—can’t escape “rot,” this is northern New Jersey.
In Skyler’s most recent school—“private”—“prep”—“high-security”—in Basking Rid
ge, New Jersey, the taboo subject, the most thrilling subject, darker/deeper/more delicious than sex, was suicide.
Killing yourself. Taking your own life.
A challenge! Any loser can play.
For casual browsers leafing through these pages, is your attention fleetingly captured by The Suicide’s Handbook: 22 Tips for a Safe Way Out? Or, better yet How to Die Without Fucking up Yet Again: A Handbook for the Burnt-Out Generation.
Reasoning in Skyler’s case it might not “hurt” too much: as soon as the match is struck, assuming the (wooden, clumsy) match doesn’t break, as soon as the tiny flame leaps onto the lighter-fluid-soaked clothing you’ll be in shock, right? Shock means plummeting blood pressure, oxygen cut off from the brain, mind gone, no turning back. As Dad would say Fin-it-o.
Or as Mummy would say No one will know Skyler not ever
Walking/limping above the ravine of enormous misshapen rocks glistening with melting snow, melting ice, litter of broken glass, junkies’ discarded needles. There, the graffiti-covered rock-ledge from which a few months ago a sixteen-year-old girl (Caucasian, runaway from Summit, New Jersey) smoking crystal meth with her boyfriend somehow—“accidentally”—slipped and fell and died on the rocks thirty feet below. The ravine, a place of sordid romance by night when young and still good-looking junkies hang out together and so, an appropriate site for “self-incineration”—“immolation.”
Overhead, a gigantic cumulus cloud. Massive, misshapen. In earth science at Hodge Hill, Skyler had learned the names of clouds. Skyler had drawn and labeled cloud-shapes, and Skyler had earned a grade of A. At mid-term.
What you don’t usually notice, the beauty of clouds. Even ugly-beauty. All that you fail to see. Yet, it’s there. Not the litter or the graffiti or the overturned/mangled park benches but the trees. Damn tall beautiful trees. Might be oaks, with thick trunks. Skeletal branches in this cold season, no leaves but clumps of damp snow like blossoms. The cruelty in such beauty: it stands outside and beyond you.
My right leg was throbbing with pain. But it was the old comfort-pain. Fantim pain Mummy called it. Yet Skyler Rampike’s pain has always made him special. As Bliss’s pain made her special.
“Bliss had to die. Because she was special.”
I was walking now with a makeshift crutch, a broken tree limb. If you are “challenged” by pain often all you require is a slight correction in your walk, a redistributation of your weight. We’d passed the fantim pain back and forth between us and now Bliss is gone, the fantim pain remains with Skyler.
Loud voices, shouts. “Hey man!”—“Fuck man!”—boys playing basketball in the lightly falling snow. Only a backboard and a rim lacking a net but the high-school-age boys (black, big) were managing to sink baskets, leaping and shouting with feverish intensity, Skyler couldn’t help watching, and admiring. Skyler has never been, as the reader knows, an athlete; nor even an admirer of athletes; what’s the physical body but something to, essentially, let you down when you need it, is Skyler’s belief.
Also close by, approaching Skyler on the path was a stock-bodied young black woman pushing a baby in a stroller and beside her a little girl of three or four, chattering and laughing and so alive and as I passed the little family couldn’t help smiling at the young mother, at the baby in the stroller, and at the little girl whose shiny dark eyes lifted to mine guardedly, the little girl’s forefinger was in her mouth, a beautiful child with widened eyes of alarm and interest and the thought came to me Maybe this isn’t the time to punish yourself, maybe this isn’t the place. More audacity is required to live. I felt a thrill of elation: I could return to my squalid rented room, I could return to my task, no hope of “completing” it for the story of Bliss Rampike must be a story that will never be completed. I smiled to think if I hadn’t seen the face of my sister’s murderer at least I had not seen my own face.
Did I hurt Bliss, Mummy? was it me
No! not you Skyler not ever you
“Excuse me.”
On the walk a few feet in front of me the young light-skinned black woman stood, agitated. Out of nowhere she’d emerged. And the baby fretting in the stroller, and the dark-eyed little girl sucking at her forefinger, half-hiding behind her mother’s sturdy legs.
“You been followin’ us? Why so?”
“I—have? I haven’t.”
Somehow, I’d returned the way I’d come. Just ahead was a small bleak playground of swings, teeter-totter, littered sandbox and children’s wading pool in which snow lay in mysterious clumps and patches in mimicry of child-swimmers long since departed. Falling snow was melting on the pavement and on the heated skin of my face. Without knowing what I’d been doing I seemed to have doubled back on myself once, twice?—three times?
The woman spoke loudly. Her young face was sharp-boned as the edge of a shovel, her eyes bulged and glared with a kind of savage thrilled merriment. “My daughter is asking, ‘Why’s that man looking at me?’—she’s scared, mister. And I don’t like it.”
Quickly I apologized. I hadn’t meant to scare anyone.
“You don’t stop following us, mister, know what?—I’m gonna summon the police.”
There was logic here. I wasn’t going to contest it. Hunched in my hooded jacket, I backed off.
Limping away using the tree limb as a cane, Skyler fled.*
* Suspicious reader! By now you’ve been wondering how the hell Skyler Rampike, unemployed/unemployable nineteen-year-old high school dropout, can afford to live even in the squalid rented room on Pitts Street, New Brunswick. Right? Fact is, Skyler has been the beneficiary of a trust fund established by his grandmother Edna Louise Rampike at the time of her death in March 2003 after a lengthy illness exacerbated by C.A.E.M. (“Chronic Acute Elderly Melancholia”) which first struck the seemingly indomitable old woman in the late winter of 1997 in the whirlpool-aftermath of her granddaughter’s (yet unsolved, luridly publicized) murder. Poor Grandma Rampike! Not just the loss of her prized grandchild but the ceaseless “sullying”—“trampling”—of the proud Rampike name seemed to have destroyed Edna Louise utterly. Yet she took time to set aside, in her will, a small trust in her grandson Skyler’s name, “as partial recompense for the pain and anguish this boy has endured” which paid out to Skyler, by way of checks made out to him by Edna Louise Rampike’s executor G. Gordon Swidell, a modest sum of $500 a month. Not much, you’re thinking, and you are right, but on such a sum Skyler could “scrape by.” Usually.
* In fact, it was far worse than this. What I’d hoped to evoke in “Black Dirigible”—keen-eyed readers will note the subtle poetic trope!—was Skyler’s poignant epiphany of death-in-life/life-in-death and his (courageous, quixotic?) decision to return to the writing of this exhausting manuscript; what actually happened was less poignant than brutally comic, or maybe just brutal, for as Skyler limped away from the angry young mother he was suddenly set upon by the boys who’d been playing basketball nearby, punched, pummelled, knocked to the ground and kicked repeatedly. For these were indignant black boys, who could blame them? Grungy jacket and trousers torn, pockets turned inside out, loose bills and change taken, as much as twenty-five dollars, plus the new purchases from the 7-Eleven, and a final kick in the face, there Skyler lay wheezing, whimpering, bleeding (nose, mouth), writhing like a giant worm on the cold, very hard and ungiving pavement of some urban park he had no idea where, why he’d come here, what had happened to him, or would happen when he dared to open his swollen eyes.
“RECOVERED MEMORY”!
…LOVED MUMMY DESPERATELY BEFORE EVEN THERE WAS DESPERATION IN our lives…
PRICELESS VIDEOTAPE!*
SKYLER WHAT DID YOU DO HONEY WILL YOU TELL MUMMY
A very poor quality tape. Grainy, murky as if the scene is underwater. The recording device—an old camcorder, apparently—is handheld and the hand is shaky and whoever the hand belongs to, the viewer will not see.
The tape is but a fragment. All that remains is seventy-two seconds long.
&n
bsp; The off-camera voice is muffled, distraught, unmistakably female Skyler tell where sister did you
The child! Seems to be a boy though his facial features are not very “masculine.” Blurred and wavy as if in fact he’s underwater. Or one of those elusive figures who drift through our dreams, sometimes even relatives of ours, who, so perversely, lack fleshed-out faces. What the viewer can see of this child’s face is that his skin is unnaturally pale as if drained of blood, and appears to be sweaty; small, and triangular in shape, like a cobra-face (or do I mean “cobra-head”—do cobras have “faces” persay?) and the deep-set eyes are droopy-lidded (exhaustion? evasion? guilt?) and eerily glassy (like marbles?). The child’s light-colored hair is disheveled as if he’s been wakened from sleep. His flannel pajama-top hangs oddly on his narrow chest as if already at his young age (you’d never guess more than seven) he has learned the protective strategy of hunching/scrunching himself to appear smaller than he is, younger than he is, more helpless/innocent than he is.
In theory, the tape is in color. In fact its color is so faded it resembles an old black-and-white film of the kind seen almost exclusively on late-night TV.
Skyler? tell me what did you do
Where have sister please? Mummy is
The handheld camera approaches the fearful child who seems to be murmuring a response. Whatever the child says, his words are so muffled you can’t hear. To make matters worse, he wipes at his nose, and mouth, with both hands.
Skyler? Please tell me in this house? have looked and looked playing one of your games? hide-and-seek? tell Mummy neither of you will be punished Mummy promises
The child stares blankly as if he hasn’t heard or, having heard, doesn’t know what the words mean. His lips part but no sound emerges.
Wipes at his leaky nose, begins to cry.
* What the National Enquirer would pay for this lost video! Tabloid TV! Network TV! Leaked to the magisterial New York Times, the skeletal transcript would be replicated verbatim and the shadowy figure of nine-year-old Skyler Rampike would be emblazoned on the very front page of the paper, if but below the fold. For this video, which Skyler can only vaguely recall having seen in the tense and suspenseful interlude before his father was summoned to come home, and his sister’s body was found in the furnace room of the house, would seem to have been viewed by only Daddy and Skyler and Mummy, who recorded it. Soon afterward, it disappeared. No Fair Hills police officers nor even the Rampikes’ zealous attorneys Kruk and Crampf and eventually Rosenblatt would glimpse it. What happened to this incriminating tape, do you think? My feeling is that quick-acting/decisive Daddy destroyed it before any outsiders were summoned to the house.