“But he has nothing to say Debra,” Tom would repeat, each time higher than the next. “You keep asking him his opinion on this and there just isn’t one. He’s said it straight: he doesn’t know. What else could you possibly want from the boy?” Debra, the calloused lush that she was, simply scoffed.
“If the boy ain’t got nothing to say, he might as well die. This world ain’t for living with a sealed mouth, I can tell you that much.” She swayed back and forth on her heels, her cheap boxed Cabernet sloshing against the sides of her over-sized glass.
Yano, it was true, was a quiet boy who, more often than not, felt not the need to speak or give an opinion on the matter. It was often the case that in a matter of seconds he could see both sides of the argument or given situation and this understanding led quickly to a cancellation of not one in favor of the other, but rather a cancellation of the argument altogether. On matters of low importance such as the color of a shirt to wear to school, or a particular food to like or dislike, Yano excelled. These were definitive moments, decisions easily encased in the consumption or retrieval of a physical object. On matters such as lying as in, “Yano, you said you loved me but then you lied to me about doing the dishes,” the grays overcame the particulars and the absurdity of the claim deadened his lips.
“When a boy don’t talk, it don’t mean nothin’. He’s just tired Debra, that’s all. No need to go on about dying and all that. Leave the boy alone.” Tom would often defend Yano. It was Yano’s belief that this had nothing to do with him at all and in fact, it was the case that Tom was defending not Yano, but the childhood version of himself against an overbearing mother who, like Debra, was tanked nearly 23 of the 24 hours in a day.
Debra glanced at Tom flippantly, bringing the glass firmly to her lips with both hands. Smacking her teeth, she retorted, “The boy has the skin of a pussy Tom. If I can puncture him that easily, what do you think those moronic masses out there on the streets are going to do to him?” Debra would often speak in generalizations about “masses” as if she were their muse and knew their every move, let alone their names. Masses, according to Debra’s logic, were responsible for the large majority of the world’s problems including, but not limited to: global warming, obesity, speeding, water contamination, rug burns and that, “little pain just in the back of the head, sort of like a needle banging my brain” as Debra would put it or, as the rest of us would call it, a common headache. Yano, after hearing his mother’s rants about the woes connected to the “masses” and Tom’s sub-par retorts, quickly came to the conclusion at the age of eight that both of his parents were write-offs in his larger pursuit of a life not devoid of meaning and would wall up in a shroud of silence and contemplate things complicated, of which Yano found many.
Yano supposed that, at the end of the day, not much needed to be said. It was often the case that everything had already been said before or there were few, if any, to listen. To find someone willing to spend time to have a meaningful conversation, one in which both parties were forced to confront uncomfortable realities in their own lives in the pursuit of some understanding of a larger reality, was uncommon to say the least. To many, Yano found, he was much too young to take seriously or people quickly became uncomfortable with the idea that once one truth was reached, it would be refuted and the search would continue, undoubtably unabated. Perhaps too it was the manner in which Yano began such conversations: “I’d like to talk to you. But not just about anything. I want to talk to you about something really important, something that makes you uncomfortable. I want to talk in a manner befitting what the tool of talking was made for in the first place: to communicate. To pass on information but to grow with each other, move with each other, challenge each other, to create and destroy simultaneously, to…” He would continue in such a manner for minutes on end and, for a child that was known to speak so little, Yano on these occasions was quite literally unstoppable. He found very few to live up to his standards and as a result, lived the large majority of his formative years completely devoid of conversation or communication for that matter.
Debra hated the child, swore against the very day he had emerged from her womb. One could blame it on the drink but the distinction between the woman and the bottle was nearly impossible by now. Tom dealt with it through long business trips and sour whiskeys taken steadily throughout the day. Yano coped by conversing with himself in fanciful inner dialogue and walking nearly everywhere he needed to go. He was a prime suspect to be one of those children on the back of milk cartons and, in a matter of days, he would be.
The subways seemed like a distant memory to him now. The oranges, yellows, reds on the cracked plastic seats, the greasy poles with layers of human grime upon them, the scuffed and speckled linoleum floors. He would later remember only the sensations of urine and feces, frozen moving airs of each subway car, the occasional homeless man or woman slouched in the corner, every other passenger a safe distance away. Safe enough to avoid the stench, safe enough to forget their resemblance to the blanketed mass.
His memories would soon become impressions really, existent nodes of operation implanted in the dark recesses of his mind. The synaptic flows associated with navigating a largely mechanized metropolis would slow, his life would become more countenanced, he would remember the follies of his high-speed lifestyle, laugh…sometimes cry. Chapters in his life would feel foreign, as if noir episodes, dream-like and of an ulterior being’s life. Such was the city he would come to find: as distance traveled, the grit and grime remained, the city engrained within his very being. Within his brow, the gum-laden sidewalks of Union Square. Within his neck, the towering skyscrapers of the financial district. In his toes, the stony sway of the Brooklyn Bridge. A place as large and divergent as New York congealed into a recognizable being and the memoried sensations arrived in pregnant waves. The hot dog vendor on 14th and 4th Ave, the schwarma truck on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, the guards standing glassy-eyed on the stoops of rich residences on Madison Avenue: the recognizable New York arose again and again, only to recede into white noise washing the walls of his quiet, new life.
He looks out the window, hears the garbage men rolling past, their tired bodies lumbering out of the dirtied vehicles, veiny arms straining to lift each bag and throw them into the compressor. The pigeons have gathered early this morning, congregating in front of his Haitian neighbor who sits, bent back and bag of bread crumbs in hand, tossing wistful handfuls of crumbs to the ground below. The pigeons proceed with regularity, as if composed of a daily musical movement, their contribution to the overture of the grand metropolis written in fluid steps, bobbing heads, the occasional flutter of grayed wings as a boy rides his bicycle down the tree-lined promenade. The air is thick, womb-like, hot and sticky and he wipes his forehead with the back of his sleeve, looks at it in his left hand, checking for dirt left behind. There is none and this comforts him. He feels himself a beacon of cleanliness in a city dampened by the downtrodden, the filthy rich, the grit and grime of a never-ending pursuit.
The trees droop in the increasing heat. Yesterday his downstairs neighbor, a jazz singer and makeup artist, had come up to ask for sugar. It was cliche yet it was only the second time he had ever seen her so he engaged her in conversation, lent her the sugar and they exchanged smiles, forced into a joint suffering by the stifling heat and the longing for sweetness in their lives. She had smiled at him only once but it was a deep smile, a carving into the loamy soils of his persona that had rarely been touched. It was to be the highlight of his week and he treasured the exchange, rolled it around in his brain for hours on end, creating alternate scenarios whereby the request for sugar turned into hikes through unchartered forests, swims in the purple oceans in the Eastern coastal waters of the Atlantic, jovial dinners and lusty moments in public places. In the end he would return to himself as a dying star which collapses in on itself. He was left alone, an observer of the chaotic movements of the world of New York City which he knew only through the picture frames of his window panes, mere snippets of a city too large for any one person to ever truly understand.
The garbage men had now moved on, replaced by the criss-crossing movements of the sidewalk gentry. Older men, now retired, carved out the sidewalk spaces with their presence. As if surrounded by orbed forcefields, space was allocated to these men through furtive glances, downcast eyes, outspread arms and crossed legs. Their casualness was an enactment of force, a silent attack on the territories of the Parkway promenade. Their victories were pronounced through relaxed non-chalance, the fact that they did not move was a statement that they did not need to move. And so it goes.
He wondered if ever there would come a time when he would leave this place. He had never grown up Catholic but believed that flagellation was as common as breathing in New York. Perhaps it was through drugs or alcohol, stress or the continual pursuit of money, cloistering oneself in one’s home or flitting about as a manic social butterfly, but everyone seemed to have a guilt of sorts to expunge, a need to punish oneself, a need to deny life and wallow in the shallows or darkened depths of the dead. The metropolis was a place to lose oneself, to in a way give in to the notion that we are all born guilty or sinful, to accept this and in a way, give in. New York City was the whip near everyone’s back, the dirtied sore which everyone navigated on their way to work, to meet friends for drinks, to pick the kids up at the private schools, or have meetings at an upscale Manhattan restaurant. He had known other places, knew that the quality of life in New York City was poor as compared to other places he had been, and yet the allure was still there, that guilt-ridden pleasure of enjoying something that is so very bad for you, that thing which you say to yourself, “I’ll quit this just as soon as…” but never do.
He was quitting the city, taking a break and the scenes from his window became those of sepia moments of grainy film in a picture show. With a steadied right hand, he turned the handle of the antique camera, heard the whirring of the film through the feed, documented in memory that which he was so near to saying goodbye to.
