The trumpet sounds through intercom speakers in the form of a man’s voice—“2 minutes”—echoing off these blackened underground walls. In “2 minutes” I will learn the mysteries of our fate, I will live the time that was and is and will be; I will dance the last song of bloom.
I can hear it now, calling out like a howl in an ocean storm, its two glowing eyes peeking from around the tunnel bend. Eternal light. I stand up. Close my eyes. Ready to sprawl in its warmth…
“Mothafucka I’ll cut ya! I swear to God I’ll cut ya!”
Donny?
My ascent ends prematurely due to the commotion caused by two men squaring off—a tall, dread-headed homeless man in gray sweatpants versus Donny, my eccentric neighbor, who is swinging a boxcutter like a mad conductor swings his baton. Only when Donny screams again do I remember my name.
“When I’m done they’ll be scraping your bicuspids off the fucking floor!”
A group of commuters separate the two and Donny prances back to where I stand. “Ol’-Donny-o still got it,” he says with a grin while elbow jabbing my arm. I see his black hair, shiny little slick back, wet from a mixture of sweat and dollar store hair gel. Eyes still heavy from the climb, or perhaps the summer heat, or the two star-shaped pills Donny gave me with my bialy this morning (“Vitamins,” he said), I make out the rest of his form: wrinkled, oversized slacks with a Sonny Crockett blazer to match; an immense belly protruding past his lower half by at least five inches. The air fetid from singed subway tracks as he waves at the long tapestry of indistinct faces in the blur of a passing train. The lights zoom by. Leaving us yearning for something that won’t reveal itself in the hoary afterglow.
“Still with me? Don’t let me down, bud. I need you to bear witness.”
Awareness comes in short bursts like a kid flipping through channels, focal point shifting between dreams and a foggy in-between. Bear witness. Somewhere I recall Donny’s claim about the “most important appointment” of his life. “I’m with you”—Who let these words exit my mouth?
Donny takes me by the arm and we hop on a train and make our way—uptown, downtown, underground; past panaderias and check-cashing stores; past the street walkers in their substance-enkindled stupor, gabbling to the wind like talking corpses; past the kids on playgrounds and the old women who pray for them. Outside, it all rushes by while I lose my mind.
“Aww pobrecito,” I hear Dulce, the local prosti, say when we cross paths while exiting our train.
“Dul, how’re the wings shaking?” says Donny. Dulce once paid him for a palm reading—apparently she’s an incarnated angel.
“Sorry to hear you and Lena broke up,” she says. “I’ll beat that bitch’s ass if you want.”
For the past week, Donny and Lena’s split has served as the subject of gossip in our neighborhood. Donny says they stayed together for 2 years, but how much of that time Lena actually knew about her “girlfriend” status remains a mystery. Their very first date can’t be described as anything other than a farce—he feigned having lung cancer to get her to go to dinner, claiming it as his “last wish” and that he only had “3 months to go.” Miraculously, his cancer went into remission after just a few weeks of dating her.
Donny’s face turns expressionless. He smooths out the sides of his blazer and pulls his slacks high above his belly button like an old man in a 1930’s screwball comedy. “I got a really important appointment I gotta go to, I gotta go, gotta go.”
We exit the subway station and turn down 16th street and start walking faster. The glint in his eyes tells me Donny is in street-smart mode. He pulls a camel cig to his lips, glances over his shoulder every couple of seconds; he curses under his breath, curves and cuts across city block crowds with his chest puffed out, strutting, like he’s got a 30-pound weight strapped to his right leg. Why do I follow this man? Donny says our destination is close and that I’ll “shit” when I see where we end up. This fills me with laughter, so much so that I start to feel queasy. I bow from the weight of hysteria, visualizing my thoughts breaking and scattering into a thousand moving pieces, scurrying about the inside of my skull. I try to hold it together. For a moment, I see my body standing just beyond my grasp. I have the strangest urge to turn and slip away.
“Hey Donny—you ever think about death?”
“Oh, God.”
“I mean it.”
“So do I. You know my cousin, Lanny, the esthetician? The guy caught sepsis last year from an infected gallbladder. During surgery, the doctors said he died for like a minute. He told us later he saw the afterlife. He said he was drifting on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic when a huge rose window appeared in the sky, just hovering. The fucking thing was hovering! And he said the light coming from it was blinding. And that the glass in the window was blood red and diamond beveled, like those stained-glass ones at church. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, my cousin said.”
“So, what was behind it?”
“Behind what?”
“The red glass.”
“I didn’t ask.”
As a kid, I used to think when we die judgment would come in the form of God gathering the deceased’s ancestors into a theater to watch every sin the person committed while alive; they’d then take a vote to decide whether or not the person should go to heaven. If my big moment had came, they’d have found out about the day I stole $40 from my grandmother’s wallet, or all the times I fantasized about fucking my aunt while she slept, or how I wished my classmates dead whenever they picked on me. Surely the screen in the sky sheds a forgiving light on the life of a little boy. But what about the man? I haven’t forgotten the beginnings. The original times, when my brothers smiled because they meant it, and wore their youth like a cap. Some days I can’t inhale those feelings, so much to the point that I tear up and dig and scratch and dig and rake until my eyes turn raw and red and prickling. I miss my brothers. I’d like to think I’d do anything to redeem us. Even if it means walking through hell to deliver them to the most important moment of their lives.
And just then my fellow brother informs me—“Look! We’re here!”
We finally arrive at our destination—a phone booth on the corner of 16th and Folsom. Donny thrusts forward and hugs the metal box. I look around in bewilderment, trying to see if I missed something. After all this time, this is it? I turn to Donny—“I don’t get it.”
He smiles and points at a video rental shop across the street called Micky’s Pictureland. There, in front of the display window, sitting behind the front counter, is his ex-girlfriend, Lena, dressed in a green work uniform. Donny slides in the phone booth, pops a few coins into the pay slot, and punches a number. I immediately see Lena answer the shop phone. Donny disguises his voice by going a couple octaves lower when he speaks into the handset:
“Uh, hi, yea I was calling to see if some particular DVDs were in stock…Sure…the title of the first one is ‘King Dong’…No, not ‘Kong,’ I said ‘Dong’…No? It’s okay. How about the second one—it’s called ‘Remember the Tight Ones’…You sure? Dang. Okay, how about ‘Citizen Chode’?…No? ‘The Tales of Hymen’?…‘Two and a Half-inch Man’?…No, I’m not joking, I’m serious…Okay, okay, last one I swear. This one I know for sure you’ll have. This one’s called ‘Lena’s A Big Fucking Two-Timing Cum-Guzzling Twat Who Sucks Cock By The Pound’! You gotta have that one!”
Donny slams the phone down and falls to the pavement, laughing. He is laughing, horribly, frightfully, frenziedly, uncontrollably. Passersby stop to observe the racket, but no one offers a word.
I miss my brothers, I truly wish we’d all come back together again. Sometimes, in this indefinite progress of existence, I find ways to make the seconds pass slower or faster, and even stop. Other days, like today, I wonder how long I can hold out before losing the will to remember their faces and names; how long I can keep the show going before I forget my bits and beats, and bomb in front of the world.
I walk out to the middle of the street, among the traffic, and pause to look at the sky. But I can’t find the great pane and bevels, or the fiery wash. And as the sun winds down into a smoldering, purple ember, I think of new skies, new potential, new light, but quickly get knocked out of my reverie by the sounds of laughter all around me.