**********
The word didn’t take long to get out. Even now he could feel them looking at him from the corners of their eyes with a desperate, eye-popping expectation. It was always the same, and was going to get worse.
Rachel had found him two weeks previously, rocking on the floor of his apartment, wailing and in fiery pain. A week in the hospital had brought some relief from the pain, but the joint degeneration from his Rheumatoid Arthritis had accelerated dramatically and he was now housebound to a wheelchair. He had regained some use of his arms, able to grasp objects as big or bigger than a can, but unable to type or even use a fork. He had been relocated to a rehab center where the doctors reckoned he would spend the next few months, learning how to live with his infirmity. His editors at American Fanfare had been kind in taking their time distancing themselves from him, but he knew the tether would be cut shortly and his life as a journalist was at an end.
It was only a chance encounter in the drab dining hall a week ago, when he had reached out to touch one of the other wheelchair bound patients, that had started it all. He didn’t even remember why he had touched the man. Maybe to comfort him. He had turned back to his meal of liquid gruel, something he could hold in his hand and drink with a straw.
A stunned clattering behind him had caused him to look back. The man he had touched, a twenty year old black man who had been paralyzed in a car accident, had stood up with wobbling sureness from his wheelchair and pushed it over. That was the clattering sound Alan had heard. The man had stood there shakily, his eyes wide and white and bulging in his black face, staring at Alan with fright and wonderment. He took a step, then another, growing steadier by the second. He took another step towards Alan and Alan, in that instant, wanted more than anything to cower away from this freak of nature: a man with a sheared spinal cord who should never walk again steadily plodding towards him.
The two dozen other invalid patients in the dining room erupted in shouts and amazement. Every eye turned towards Alan and he recoiled in fright as their hungry, demanding gaze landed on him. The rehab attendants appeared then and settled the protesting, newly ambulatory man back into his wheelchair and spirited him and Alan away. They had seen it, too.
A week later, they could put it off no longer. It was time for Alan to return to the general rehab population. The attendant pushed him down the hallway and Alan could as much feel as see those in their rooms wheeling their useless bodies to the doorways, parking their wheelchairs in the openings and staring after him as he rolled by, hungry lions in the den. But, Alan thought, God would not shut the lions’ mouths and they would eat him up, bit by bit and day by day until he was all used up.
He began to weep, his warm tears running down his face and spotting his white hospital gown, knowing that his gift, like Cyrus’s, had come at a dreadful cost. He thought back to the punishing touch of the angel, Emmanuel (it meant “God is with us”. Alan had looked it up). He remembered Cyrus removing his sunglasses on that terrible night, looking at him with those empty sockets and saying: “I could heal the blind, but I could never heal myself.”
And Alan knew that those he touched might yet rise from their imprisonment, but he would remain forever jailed, a wizened husk left to live out his useless years in pain and want.
God was not mocked.
Only for You (Bookends I)
By
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2014
All Rights Reserved
People say writers are an odd lot, wrapped about as tight as the failing elastic in a pair of socks well past their best-by date. They wonder why one would squander their energy and their years fabricating and peddling lies. But, see, it's not about wasting your youth, but keeping it alive. And it's not about telling fibs, but finding the truth in the uncomplicated things that make this day worth soldiering on to the next. Happiness is as easy as having something to look forward to, even if those things might be unforeseen and removed from each other by decades.
Like this.
As a sickly kid, I lived inside my head a lot. A dead faint would be my payment for the least bit of exertion and it seemed the most I could do and still remain upright was to write stories. So I filed away every little thing and I would take those memories and embroider them, and shuffle them about, and sand off the rough edges to make the square peg of memory fit in the round hole of the story I was telling and, after a while, I was never sure how much was real, and how much I made up.
But this particular thing, I'm almost sure it happened this way.
Growing up in a rural area, where people still planted their own gardens and laid in their own meat, Halloween was a big deal. Trick or Treat had to wait until the corn and beans were shucked and hulled, the potatoes dug, the produce canned or frozen and the meat salted and put by. Still, I was a kid at one time and on this particular Halloween, I was forced to tag along with my brother, Ricky.
He was about five years older than me. A real lady's man was my brother, Ricky, and still is, I guess. He had, only days before in that long ago autumn of 1975, purchased his first car, a 1968 MG, from Alton Foley, the slick little car salesman (every little burg has one) and empty-headed queef in my one-horse town. Alton had asked for twelve hundred and Ricky had fanned out seven, one hundred dollar bills with as expansive a flourish as J.P. Morgan buying The Carnegie Steel Company and turning it into United States Steel. As I later marveled over such a shrewd negotiation, Ricky eased me into some of the realities of life by telling me that “when that man saw folding money, he jumped. He would have broken my arm before letting me leave there with seven hundred, cash.”
I would have been about thirteen or fourteen, and Ricky didn't really seem to mind me hanging around. I was pretty self-contained and self-sufficient, so I wasn't going to cramp his style. There were various parties, and festivals, and holiday things going on in the assorted little settlements that dotted our little half acre of paradise, and he seemed to want to hit every one of them (tooling us around in that same little, yellow, 1968 MG midget convertible which was as drafty as a newspaper windowpane).
We landed at some kind of Halloweeny thing that had a generous mixture of teenagers and young children. There were lots of costumes and carved pumpkins and loud music. Ricky went off to do the things that hairy, teenage boys do: smoke cigarettes, drink beer, tell lies to teenage girls, leaving me as sort of half-assed chaperone to a speeding flock of seven and eight year olds. Again, because of my ill health, I was a late bloomer and very small for my age, tipping the scales at a mighty eighty pounds on my first day of high school. It would have taken more than a keen eye to realize I was more than a couple of years older than those I was charged with looking after.
The young kids were all off on one side of the room while the teenagers did their bit on the other side. Boys and girls bobbed for apples, they did the broomstick races, they gobbled down candy, all of these frenetic activities punctuated by lots of shrill shouts and sugar highs.
Of the ten youngsters I was saddled with, one little hellion in particular seemed determined to hustle me into a premature heart attack. Raven-haired and energetic, she zipped back and forth through the pack, bouncing hither and thither like a cat on hot asphalt. What was I going to do? They were all just being kids. I resigned myself to the unhappy knowledge that the whole thing was going to degenerate into a complete dumpster fire. The best I could do was mop up and try to keep anybody from drowning in the apple-bobbing tub.
I sat back and sighed with resigned frustration and the little dark-haired maven looked back at me and smiled, all round, brown eyes and innocence. And I guess my sigh must have been a little more exasperated than I thought, because she looked, for just a moment, very sad. With all the grace and self-assurance of the woman she would surely become, she reached into her bag of Halloween candy and took out a tiny, foil-wrapped piece of chocolate, and handed it to me. It really was the sweetest thing.
“This one,” she told me, “is on
ly for you.”
It was all she ever said to me. Then she went springing off to the rest of her friends.
I never did know her name, but I never forgot her, either. Not even after years of traveling all over the country, and getting married, and watching my own children grow up and move on, and getting older and seeing relatives and loved ones pass over, one by one, to their reward. Your own mortality begins to whisper more loudly in your ear that all is fleeting and you try to hang on to those guiltless little pieces of the past when life was warm and untroubled, and stretched out before you like it would never end.
But I wanted to write this down because, you know, I ran into that little girl again thirty-five years later. Grown up now, of course, the mother of three and as beautiful a woman as she was pretty as a little girl. I often asked myself if she was the same little girl, with no way of ever knowing for sure. But the eyes -from the days of candy apples and county fairs until the day they look upon their last sunrise- don't change. And though I got to know her some, she might wonder why I sometimes fall silent, or my gaze drifts a little bit. You see, I'm sure she has no memory of the thing that left such a lasting mark in my mind, so I never told her the story.
But it remains, always, with me. I mean, how could you not remember the girl who gave you your first kiss?