Immurement, Part One

My house was silence. It was not silent; it was silence. I had long ago learned to simply walk on through it. Silence accompanied my father's footfalls as they ascended the inevitable stairwell, heavy and dragging with the black night air. Silence lingered in the very white of my mother's unblinking eyelids. Silence remained even after the sting of it had subsided. It had been worse than the beatings; worse than the screaming; worse than the bottles breaking or the plates exploding; worse than any kind of rage or raw savagery. Silence had been the indication of emptiness. And I knew too much about emptiness: my empty eyes cast downward at an empty plate, the next three days wandering the street, searching for something to fill the silence—their particular aching silence—that scratched at my brain like needles. Too many nights had passed smelling of blood and bourbon on the walls. So I, too, was silence in that house.

I had just put myself down for the night. The sky pulsed with silver light; the moon blinked as their voices rose and scraped against my bedroom wall. All of it was the same nightly script I was trained to ignore: their voices bubbling over one another, streams of rage, or something more, flowing as lava between them. Tonight was no different...but from the low boil of their voices it seemed different—

Then my eyes flew open. A click. A click sounded from behind the wall and I immediately knew what it was: the cabinet door swinging open.

I took the Lord's name in vain.

The same murmur fluttered from her lips on the other side. I tucked my face into the pillow and tried not to imagine her face, but my eyes felt like cancer, swelling and hot, snapping quickly and decisively shut.

Noise shook the quiescence from the house as my mother transmitted a powerful scream into the night—sudden, too sudden. Pain tore apart my ears, swallowing the sound whole in the flare of its jaws.

She screamed my name before it was cut short. Too short.

The pounding of footfalls down the stairwell announced that some great deed had been done. And the resulting quiescence was heavy, digging deeper into the carpet with every step. Silence followed suit as my eyes stretched in the silverlit moon.

"Mom," I said, finally.

I remember that day because the entire world, for one turn of the planet, felt the silence that had always been our home.

I remembered how my mother knelt down until she curled in a neat little ball, clutching a flask in one hand and the newspaper in another, whispering into her neck of white rosary beads. Face red, hands white—she looked like the Queen of Hearts.

And my father; silence was that day . . . . that day my father came home.

The day he came home, he had bought a revolver. Standard issue semiautomatic. He kept it in the cabinet next to the rosary, next to the flask, next to the newspaper—a revolver. I never knew why it was there. A revolver in the cabinet. A revolver.

For protection.

But I knew fear was going to be the only protection I'd unlock from that cabinet.

I had stumbled on the threshold, falling to my knees and landing on the floor with a definite crack. Being careful not to groan, I put my palms against the wall and lifted myself up. I didn't want to look at the growing red mass on the floor; I wasn't sure whether to laugh in her face or sit down and cry in her lap.

"Mom."

Silence met me—her eyes grew wide and black. Her gums throbbed with loose and leaking veins; her nose had been broken upon hitting the floor. Her tears, unacknowledged, tumbled down her cheeks like droplets of ink.

“You drunk?” she whispered.

I nodded. This wasn't the truth, but, figuring it was better than the silence, I closed my mouth, not knowing what else to say. She looked down at her fingernails. Her hair hung in gold wisps that matted her face.

“You shouldn't drink,” she said in a whisper to the floor.

I couldn't hear myself say what I was about to say, and I wondered if she was drunk, too. Sometimes, when I would walk past her, I'd think to myself about how I'd have to pick up the bottles sprawled across her bed, when she'd fall asleep with her eyes wide open, and her pupils fixed unceasingly on a crevice in the ceiling.

I knelt down and pushed the hair out of her eyes. She burst into tears launching into a lecture on the evils of drinking. I shouldn't drink. I'd be damned if I did—demons resided in those hills of amber and ambrosia.

But I knew my father's footfalls had torn her open.

I blinked.

It was time to let the guilty hang; but it only took me eight seconds to die.

Eight seconds ago, I had the world groveling on the caps of its knees. Eight seconds ago, I had been Tom Renfield, too large for my own shadow, untouched, untouching, untouchable. With brilliant fingers I had held my mother's match, and, striking it upon my father's stone, burned with a flame of my own, youth—that amusing little flare of light that burns inside the lassitude of darkness—where my eyes had held no shame; where the snow of my smile had seduced the wits of all but the hardiest.

Flash forward to zero hour. Eight seconds separated me and the bullet.

As I began to tumble, so began the fucking bullet. My blood sloshed in my veins. The eight seconds had passed. Now I was a vessel waiting to be shipwrecked. Being shot, I became a bomb, waiting. Losing blood—I was the thrill of the spill, waiting. Dying, I was an overturned car, twisting, bucking, waiting, breathing heavily in eager fucking anticipation of the crash. Thinking about the moment I would crack open, spilling, falling, crashing—sweet Lord, there was something goddamned erotic about the wait.

Two days ago, eight seconds separated me and the street below the high-rise. The sky glowed an ambivalent band of mist—where the buildings, dipped in blue halo, trembled with sunlight—and from the clothesline ending at the flat window, white undershirts stirred with the breath of dawn. This morning wind licked my face, and I felt a bitter tongue caress me. My nerves rose as fire from beneath my skin, bubbling oil instead of sweat. God damn. When I was new to the planet, everything hurt. My mother's kisses had been like knives, running their flat, hungry sides along my waiting cheeks. Roses that she had placed so effortlessly on the flat windowsill reeked of gasoline. I shivered in my bed during the pit of the night, certain that the needles inside the mattress craved the flesh of my spine.

Eight seconds separated me and my nine-year-old body. Eight seconds and I was looking down at my release, the eternity of a broken Brooklyn street.

The doorhinges clicked. My mother came in, made a silent gasp with her eyes, and screamed at me, and pulled me away from the window. My hypnosis burst apart at hearing her voice, like a bubble landing upon a pinhead.

She had warned me about that window. She had warned me, but did I listen? No. Did I listen the night before, when she had ironed all of my clothes, and my cleanliness withered her, and made a cheap cornflower dullness of her expensive blue eyes? No. Did I listen the night before that, when I said I had “accidentally” dropped that rotting bag of oranges out the window? No. Did I listen last Saturday, when she had downed a bottle of my father's sorrow—when, laughing, she had leaned against the gasoline roses and fallen out that window herself? No, no, no, no, no. Did I know why?

Because I hated taking out the trash, I thought, where I'd run into the landlord, who always smelled like smoke and leather—the two things that curdled the acids in my stomach. Then I'd have to round the corners that were crumbling with mice and mold and shadows and—whisperings whose subtle fires were enough to melt the cartilage from my ears. And if I managed to survive that, I'd have to open the door and face the brokenness of the Brooklyn street.

All of this to toss rotting oranges, or riding an eight-second one-way elevator? I don't know, Ma.

I had since learned to tuck a famous smirk within myself. “No,” I said. And she, lit like a fuse, burned with loving maternal frustration. Suicidal piece of shit. I had everything. Why? Because she gave me everything. I had time, I had youth, I had money, I had a home, I had schooling, I had shiny new things every year. Sure, I lived in a crap apartment on the sunlit side of the lower West. That was only temporary. But, but—there was always a but with one of her wondrous spiels—but, little baby Tommy, but I was rich. How could I possibly want more?

I knew the answer, but not in my mind. It burned from the depths of my toes to that sheet of red that had never laid quite right on my head. It pounded the walls of my lungs, rattled the prison bars of my ribcage. I could never say it, never open my mouth and release it. Part of me thought that it would target me mother like a bullet. Another part of me thought that it was a grandiose idea, too above her to mention. Still a deeper—wiser—part of me kept my silence . . . . for silence's sake.

Her eyes flared upon me. I must have looked like a little demon in her eyes, with small eyes too dark for blue; with short, solid limbs; with a flat white line for a mouth. I knew I looked just like my father. And I often didn't know if that was cause for concern or pride. Looking up, I glanced at his picture hung upon the mantle. I, too, held in my eyes that smirking look she loved . . . . or despised.

I looked back at her. I couldn't help but notice that the reflection in her eyes distorted me—made me smaller. In her eyes I was a speck, a flare of brilliant turquoise, drowning in the blue brightness of her anger.

Call it burning of the bones. I always knew she had wanted someone else. I knew she wanted a boy who had been like any one of those roses on the windowsill—big, red, happy, fragrant, warm. But she got me and I got her. And there I was: small, pale, cold, silent, smirking; smoldering like the heart within a candled flame.

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