Cartilage and Skin (23 page)

The church was beside me, a monument of stonework, filled with stained glass, its spires reaching heavenward but tapering off to a point, possibly with a failing effort, a diminishing of faith, at which the architects of the Tower of Babel would have surely blushed and thought to themselves, Why not go higher? The building itself was set back at the end of a set of long, wide steps, as if the sidewalk, the road, all the other buildings, and thus the whole city block had been planned and erected around it. Lingering at the base of the steps, I looked up at a pair of large wooden doors. I felt a sort of instinctual and sudden revulsion, a physical reaction, as something inside my stomach turned loose and slimy. I took a deep breath and swallowed hard, confused by the abrupt change in me. Maybe the impression that the recent display of mortality had made upon me was now mixing with the aloofness of the ancient building and the frigid austerity of its masonry. Maybe my reaction had something to do with my appointment, the inflamed pervert, or the bits and pieces of my bovine neighbor. My disgust tasted as if it were bubbling up in response to something scatological, yet the church appeared hard and lifeless, unable to elicit the revulsion that I felt. I continued to stare at it. Although I was ordinarily indifferent to Christianity, dismissing it with a haughty wave of my hand, as most academics do, I now had an urge to mock it. I readily found the easy, common, and trite insults. I felt myself confronting the immensity, the absurd size, of the building. The whole towering edifice seemed disproportionate to the value I invested in it. By abstracting God from its history, I imagined that throughout the ages, many sexually troubled young men had looked toward the church; they hoped to discover their calling and thus to alleviate the pulse and anguish of their private lusts, yet these lonely men—who decided to commit themselves to self-denial, who were lured out of the cramped confines of their provincial homes, who were singly drawn from various parts of the land—soon found themselves assembled in a repressed and gaudy brotherhood, within the cold, quiet, stony chambers of the seminaries, amassed in their dormitories, congregated in bathrooms, and paired off secretly in darkened nooks; they were one body, sealed from the outside world for seven years, studying together to take their holy orders, finding release in one another, finding kindred pain, longing, and confusion, and finding sex—seven years of hushed and wicked pleasure—and so the supposedly sterile seminaries were hothouses in disguise, a secret club, which every season enticed new, troubled recruits who were hoping to extinguish their forbidden desire but soon discovered the welcoming arms and yielding bodies of their brothers in the Lord.

Inexplicably, my stomach was full of slime, and I spat on the steps.

What did I care about the sin, the sex, or the pretense. Yet I was angry. Although the building loomed above me, it seemed very far away, at an impossible distance, gloating in its own majesty, rather than condescending to the squat, shabby grime of low life—even though its stones, in fact, were less polished than they were weathered and soot-covered.

I spat again.

When I started to walk, I looked around, checking to see if anyone had seen my irreverence. I suspected that I wore my vehemence on my face and almost regretted no one was there to witness it. The intensity of my emotions was being wasted. Even so, not too far from the building, I began to feel silly. I was never that absurd fool who shook his fist at God; neither did I shake my fist at slugs or doorstops. The institution of religion, which was simply a manner of people, was a different issue. I couldn't blame it for not remedying the problems of the world because I knew that the failure of Christian charity—of its feeding of the hungry and of its clothing of the poor—was in direct proportion to my own failure to adhere, as though I'd imagined charity wasn't so much a product of footwork and sacrifice as it was a poof of smoke and a misty miracle.

I spat again, this time on a scrappy tree, planted to adorn the street but now choked and horribly displaced.

A couple was coming my way, the girl leaning against the boy. She was dressed in a heap of gray sweat clothes. He had a sweatband riding low across his forehead, covering his eyebrows; his black hair appeared to have exploded out of the top of his head, as if by a shotgun blast. She hugged his arm, snuggled it between her breasts. Her caramel skin appeared to glow with beauty, simply because she was happy to be on an afternoon stroll with her boyfriend in the bitter cold. Although they were young, and their affection toward one another seemed to contain something pure and innocent, I knew, of course, that they copulated as often as they had the opportunity to be alone, that she longed to take out his penis and adore it, and that she would work him dry in dirty adoration. She would grin filthily at his satisfaction. He would feign indifference, but that was part of his allure.

As we began to close the space between us, I wanted them to see the indignation on my face. Far away, on a distant street, a small dog began to yelp, faint but incessant. Somewhere in the back of my mind, my spirit was inexplicably emboldened by the notion of being on a mission: The boy needed me, and I was heading toward some heroic gesture. I felt more important than the young couple on the sidewalk. This feeling was similar to the sense of petty power that I had experienced when I was a gangly college student working as an usher in the local movie theatre. That job had lasted only a few weekends because I had found too much cynical joy in strolling up and down the aisle, then suddenly shining the beam of my flashlight on the faces of some young, cuddly couple, disrupting their warm, romantic mood.

As they walked, the boy said something to the girl, and she—all lovely and beautiful and devoted—smiled and held onto him, as though she lacked an ego of her own and only he, who was seemingly all grunts and stonework, was her abiding strength.

For some reason, I wanted to dismantle them, not with profundity or truth, but with disdain. I was leering, full of bile, ready for confrontation. I wished I had my flashlight. Perhaps if there was no ultimate happiness, then there should be no momentary happiness either.

The boy, however, had his eye on me. He was speaking to her, but looking at me. Before I could say anything, he cut me short.

“What are you looking at, poppy?”

And so we passed one another on the street, and only the dim shadow of my intended action fell across the happy couple. In another pace or two, I once again ceased to exist to them; they strolled onward in the aura of their own radiance, in love and impenetrable. As the sound of their footsteps gradually died, I continued to hear the crazy yapping of the dog. Now it sounded closer.

I consoled myself with the thought of the couple's insignificance. They were oblivious; they couldn't have known that not far away, laid out in a hospital bed, a tortured and emaciated boy waited for me. This portrait of the boy was displayed clearly before me, yet most of it was conjured out of my imagination because I'd never actually seen the boy in such a helpless condition, nor had I ever been to the building to which I was now heading. The social worker had given me the address over the phone, and I had surely passed the place numerous times during my tenure in the city, but I had no memory of a clinic being there. Perhaps it was inconspicuous, only a weathered shingle beside a thin door.

I looked at my watch; I had time to kill. My head ached with the cold, and I wanted to find a place to sit for a moment and drink a cup of coffee. I needed to recoup my thoughts, for my mind felt burdened by too many concerns. Chief among them was the strange and terrible McTeal, who seemed to be crouching in some darkened nook, biding his time, waiting to spring on me. There had to be a reasonable way to handle this threat, yet ever since I'd learned from Claudia Jones that I'd disturbed the pervert's fantasy world, I sensed myself delaying to come to any conclusions. Whenever this dilemma entered my mind, my thoughts would scramble around frantically, like startled mice in a cage, and then I would suddenly resolve to run away. Now that the actual crisis had manifested itself on the sidewalk, in a corduroy jacket and a green cap, I still had no viable solution. Perhaps I was planning to wait until he got closer, until he was finally hiding in my bedroom closet and listening for me to drift off to sleep. Although I was heading toward the boy, I would eventually have to go home, where it no longer seemed safe.

I passed an apartment with its windows lined with Christmas lights that were already turned on, shining and blinking in vibrant colors. Not only was it too early in the day for lights but also everything seemed too drab and cold for such a giddy display. Yet it subtly evoked a fresh train of thought, for I went rapidly from thinking of the imminent holiday season and all its trappings to Christmas carols; and then Claudia Jones was sitting on the milkcrate in the alley outside my window, humming “What Child Is This?” In the next instant, my image of her fragmented, and she was divided into all her particular parts, which randomly drifted along the edges of my mind—yet, before I was fully aware of what I was thinking, a small, hysterical yapping dog bounded out of a narrow side street and continued its frenzy on the sidewalk. A larger dog lingered slowly behind it. An imperceptible string seemed to connect the lowered nose of the larger dog to the tail end of the small one.

Alarmed, I stopped walking and fixed my attention on the animals.

They were about ten paces in front of me.

The small dog, an indeterminable mixture of breeds, didn't seem to be barking randomly into the air, but actually at certain objects. It looked at the tire of a parked car and barked at it. Then the dog wheeled around and barked down the side street from which it had just emerged. Then it barked at the curb a few times. It turned and barked at the tire again. Its every movement was followed by the larger dog, some kind of gray-coated Husky which, bent at the waist, made awkward side steps and even circled around, always keeping its nose close to the other dog's tail. Both of them were without collars and seemingly disease-ridden, for the hair of the mutt was clumped and tangled, and its underbelly was especially dirty from apparently having trailed through slush; the Husky was missing patches of hair, and large black growths, shaped like cauliflower, blossomed from its joints.

At the curb was an old stone post with a metal hoop on top, to which older generations of men used to tether their horses. For some reason, the small dog focused on this post and unleashed a savagery of abrupt yaps. Because the dogs appeared absorbed for the moment, I thought I had the opportunity to slip away unobserved. I wondered for an instant if I should retreat to the next street over or simply try to pass the dogs by crossing the road. Either way, my instinct was to get immediately out of their line of sight by stepping off the sidewalk and putting the row of parked cars between us.

The instant I took my eyes off the dogs and moved between the bumpers of two parked cars, the incessant yapping stopped. I stood in the road, beside the back fender of a car, completely unnerved by the sudden silence. I crouched down and looked through the windows, trying to locate the dogs. The tethering post was visible, but the beasts were no longer by it. I had no idea if my movement had distracted them or if it was something else and they were right now chasing after it. Afraid to budge in the slightest bit, I continued to look through the windows, but not seeing the stray dogs, I huddled closer to the car and decided to wait until I was certain that danger had passed. I wanted to hear the furious yapping again—but at great distance. I was half-hoping that some unfortunate pedestrian might casually wander upon the scene and fall prey to the full fury of the animals—for at least long enough for me to run away.

I waited, but everything was still.

My head throbbed with the pulse of blood as the flesh around my wound seemed to be spastically twitching. The car was champagne colored, and the gray breath that I was exhaling upon its fender made a faint patch of steam.

After a moment, once I began to collect myself and feel reasonably certain that the threat was over, I felt a slight pressure, barely perceptible, dimpling the back hem of my overcoat. All my muscles tensed. Then came the sound of nostrils inhaling, sniffing. The pressure became more real and tangible when a dog's nose pressed against me, as if the animal wanted to burrow its snout into the cleft between my thighs.

I shrieked like a ten-year-old girl.

Making a sudden dash to get away, I tumbled against the side of the car and landed on my back, on the wet, slushy pavement. For the brief instant I lay there, both dogs gathered around and continued to sniff me. I quickly scrambled to my feet and backed away from the dogs.

“Yah. Yah!” I screamed and made some kind of shooing gesture with my hands. “Yah. Yah!” I repeated, as if I were herding livestock, such as pigs.

The dogs were standing in the center of the road, with their heads slightly cocked, inspecting me with a strange befuddled gaze.

“Yah!” I screamed and retreated another step backward. I was cautious not to run or to show fear because I believed this would have brought them pouncing down upon me.

The scraggly mutt's ears perked up, and its wide black eyes blinked several times but remained fixed on me.

Still taking its cue from the small dog, the Husky didn't move until the mutt first advanced. Before I knew how to react, they both walked up and started sniffing me again. I stood frozen as their noses nuzzled and moved over my legs and feet. I feared that if I made any gesture, their interest would take a violent turn. While the large dog seemed particularly preoccupied with the back of my knee, the small one abandoned me, walked to where I had crouched beside the car, and peed on the spot with one quick, short burst. Then it started to bark at the champagne colored car. This aroused the Husky, which straightaway left me to commence sniffing the mutt's tail end.

I took a few steps backward and then slowly started to turn, to walk away, though still glancing over my shoulder to keep my eyes on them. The more distance I put between us, the faster I walked. I was beginning to feel more comfortable, and just as I started to take stock of my situation—in particular, that I had sprawled out on the fouled street and now the back of me was wet and dirty—all at once, the yapping ceased. I turned around to see the dogs trotting toward me.