Vis-a-Vis [unfinished/draft]

            The call hit my ear like a sonic boom. “Abe, wake up.”
            My voice was creased with morning tiredness, but I managed to call back that I’d be down in a second.
            I thought, pleasantly, that I sounded a little more masculine than the day before – a little more like a man. I thought that I might’ve Aged a lot. But, when I looked to my left -- force of habit, I guess -- I saw rain. A mob of raindrops falling at the same speed, in the same direction, towards the same fate… I thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever saw. That's how I knew. You see, once you’ve lived awhile, you realize that there are things in this world -- millions upon millions of things -- that are far more beautiful than a rainstorm.
            Nobody wakes up the same age. Never. Yesterday always plays like a dream, and even though you know it’d happened, it’s lost -- like smoke on a windy day – everything, lost, except for the umbra of adventure. Of course it’s hard to tell how much you’ve Aged exactly, so we leave up to our peers, our family members, our neighbors to perceive our age. And it’s always been this way. Mom used to tell me stories – myths -- of a time when people aged progressively; of a place where age wasn’t elusive and illusive. But if there was such a place or ever such a time, it definitely wasn’t in this universe nor within the immediate horizons of our lives.
            I laid in bed, bleary eyed, the pea green of the walls and the white of the Romanesque moldings blurring together like an ebbing Caribbean tide. My hands felt the smallness of themselves as they clenched and unclenched. I thumbed the gathered skin in my palms, the fleshy rose petals of newborn Spring, and thought about all of the things in the world that were more beautiful than falling rain. Frosty grass, exploding volcanoes, Mont St. Michel, the Fjords, redwoods…
            I literally rolled out of bed, my body hitting the dark, oak floors with surprising force. It must have been considerably loud because Mom called up asking if I was all right – had anything fallen? I didn’t answer, and she didn’t call up again. Already I felt a hot pulsing on my kneecaps and I reclined on my butt to inspect the veiny, violet patches painting their way across my shins and knees. They looked especially harsh in the shadow of my bed and against the paleness of my skin, but by the time I moved to the bathroom, the pulsing had resigned to an ache.
            I splashed some water on my face, rubbed the nooks behind my ears with some warm water, and hurriedly brushed my teeth. I ran my fingertips over each front tooth’s nacre face and relished the youthful pointedness of the canines. I glanced down at my legs, skinny and birch-tree-white, and against the harsh fluorescence of the bathroom light, the bruises were already like wraiths exposed to the sunlight. I stared ahead, inspecting the pocked wall where a mirror might’ve hung.
            Most families didn’t put up mirrors, but that didn’t make me feel any stranger for not having one. Of course we owned small pieces of glass so we could tidy our hair and – when the rare occasion ever arose – for women to do their makeup. However, none of them were bigger than a child’s fist. I’d only used a real mirror once before – a full-length one --at the city fair. Lil and Happy had gone before me and swore it was the coolest thing they’d ever seen.
            “Holy crap,” Lil had said, palming her cheeks in delight, “I thought my eyes were gonna melt,”
            “They probably would’ve if I weren’t there.” Happy struck a pose wearing an expression that screamed “Transvestite Pin-up Girl” with one hand on his hip, the other on the dome of his head, and one foot pointed outwards. He looked rather awkward because of his chubby calves and equally obese arms but, of course, he didn’t fail: I laughed, much to the chagrin of Lil. She never could take any sort of joke about her looks.
            They were younger than me that night, probably in their pre-teens, and I was somewhere in my middle teens. They raved about the mirror some more, but as they tried to out-talk the other, their words began to melt together, and I gave up listening to them. But they wouldn’t be placated. They practically shoved me into the booth so I could see what they were talking about. I resisted a little, grabbing the frame of the doorless threshold and thrust my butt out. I kissed the curtain draping the doorway as I practically screamed for them to stop pushing me.
            In truth, it scared me. The mere idea of looking myself in the eye had made my throat tighten and my stomach spasm. I wondered if I was ugly. I saw people everyday – ugly people, beautiful people, fat, and petite – and I wondered if they’d still choose to live if they knew how unattractive they were. Lil and Happy weren’t bad looking. I’d been friends with them ever since day two (quite literally) and the siblings had always shared attractively wide blue eyes and flaxen hair which remained the same no matter what age they were. And, although Happy was a little pudgy and Lil was quite lithe, they both wore their respective builds quite well.
            I had tried asking them what I looked like, even for the most general of descriptions. Lil flushed in the face when I asked, mumbling something and walking away before I could ask again. Happy frowned and looked as if he were searching for the right adjectives, but he only said that he wasn’t gay -- he didn’t judge other guys’ looks.
            That’s when it got me thinking: was I to take their silence in a bad way? Were they too embarrassed to let me, their best friend, know that I was ugly -- maybe even hideous?
            The little that I know about my appearance, I owe to my mom. She told me that I had hair the color of loam and my eyes were like freshly procreated ash. I obviously could feel my own physique, but that changed daily. And my face … that was difficult. My mom told me I was the most handsome boy/man/young adult she’d ever seen, but she’s my mom. She has to say that. In my mind’s eye, descriptions didn’t come together to form one solid picture, but instead the details floated around each other like an abstract painting, the pieces malleable -- able to be put together a million different ways.
            Well, the pieces came together when Lil and Happy shoved me through the booth door. It was a ramshackle kind of structure made of just four wooden posts, both ceilings and walls draped in black polyester. The booth owner, who sat outside with a cigarette in hand and wearing a murderously serious expression, had staked out the area beside the carpet slides. It was a remote area that was quite detached from the main fair area, but not remote enough to explain why nobody else was waiting in anticipation for their turn to gaze into the mirror. Wasn’t anyone else curious to see what they looked like in the least bit? Or were we just crazy kids, the only ones in the entire world who gave a rat’s ass about what we looked like at all.

            The mirror sat on the opposite side of the room. A singular tungsten bulb hung above it, casting a circle of light around the mirror and the immediate few inches around it. It was rather filmic. I approached the other end purposely on a diagonal, afraid that I would pee my pants if I saw myself before we were vis-à-vis, as if I’d mistake myself for someone else -- maybe a ghoul that had entered the tent with me. I touched the mirror’s copper frame like a dancer touching his partner, and when I removed my hand, a greasy whorl stained the mirror’s limpid surface. On the periphery of its gaze, I looked into the mirror then as if it would kill me if I looked into it. It was a game of tact and timing.
            And then I moved.
            The first thing I noticed were my eyes. They were ashen – or, if anything, more like summer rain clouds banked against each other. My hair was the color of dirt, angled upwards like lengths of wheat facing the sun. My eyelashes were of an even darker color and petaled out in a pretty array. The knobs of my cheekbones jutted out quite sharply, melting into a jawline that was equally angular. I tried smiling, caught a glimpse of white, but then I stopped. It was like trying to smile at a dead person. I stepped back to observe, the pieces of the abstract puzzle coming together to form a painting.
            A male Mona Lisa.
            I was beautiful.

10:28:31 (first draft)

It happened just after 8:45.

            I know because Trudy had a bobble head clock of Derek Jeter. It was an awful thing that would yell out a phrase at every 15 minutes, and then chime out the stadium’s theme at every hour. Not a minute after “Homerun!”, it felt as if Atlas shook and sent the world askew.  

            Most of us ended up on the floor or beneath our desks even though the pulsing impact wasn’t of body-throwing magnitude. A woman screamed tardily, but then it fell quiet. Our throbbing hearts called out to one another in silence. No one in the entire floor made a sound, yet there was a noise in the background, clearly audible though far off at the same time. It wasn’t quite droning… It almost mimicked the pitter-pattering of rain on gabardine but most definitely thicker with a harsher accent to it.

            Our collective self immediately thought we had just experienced an earthquake. We wished it had been an earthquake. But in New York? But we’re on the 108^th floor… someone said without being prompted. Someone else shouted belatedly that it was a bomb – a terrorist bomb! Almost immediately, people took these words and regurgitated them back into whispers, and then talk, then shouts, then screams.

            People surged for the doors, the force of animal fear pressing against our bodies like the invisible hand of God. But the first wave immediately recoiled as they flushed the doorway. People began to shout and scramble – those in the front vying for the back and those in back blind to the black shade of smoke. It smelt like burning sulfur, malodorous, the kind of smell that clings to your nostrils like ticks to a vein. It smelt like burning flesh, heavy and unforgettable, so thick that it almost had a taste. By the time someone braved the blackness it was too late: a haze had already begun to settle in the entire room. 

            Women were keening. People slouched in the crevices of the room, crouched head against knees in the embrace of the walls as if the building could protect them in its inevitable collapse. There were several people begging others for their cell phones, some more aggressively than others. I felt a hand grip my arm and turned to face an older man. He had obviously been crying, the red webs of sadness stemming across the whites of his eyes, but his face was set in cemented resolve. He was gesturing a cell phone in my direction – his, I assumed – saying it was my turn.

            My turn?

            I refused. I took his hand in mine and curled his fingers back over the face of the device. He stared at me with a deep wretchedness. I know – the world had gone to shit and I didn’t have anyone to call. Young enough to have a girlfriend, old enough to possibly have kids, and yet I had neither.  It wouldn’t have even been worth calling my parents. And friends – it would make for an awkward goodbye. But the man’s eyes were almost accusatory. I would’ve explained, maybe offered a little premise, but something blot out the sun. It sounded as if the sky had cleaved in two.

            People began breaking the windows. They were all looking down, many turning away to beat their fists against the floor and cry in the severest of pains. I made my way to a slim opening and glanced down as well. My insides melted. About 10 stories down gaped a tremendous hole. Smoke, viscous and Baltic black, poured out as if from a dragon’s maw. You could make out just one thing -- a single tooth in the dragon’s mouth. It was angular and was tilted so it caught the sunlight. At a glance you would think it was just a sheet of broken metal or molten glass, but if you stared hard enough at it, you’d realize that it was far from just ordinary metal or glass. No, you’d realize you were staring down the tail end of a plane.

            A plane had knifed through the Northern tower. We were stuck. Everybody realized this. The knowledge hung on our every breath; it hung in the air like a morphic resonance. It was clear that nobody above the crash was getting out… at least not by the stairs.

            A dissonance of screams sounded as the first person jumped. Several others followed suit and a new chorus began to echo, but the screams soon became ghosts until they stopped all together and people began to line up by the windows. I hadn’t realized it, but smoke was beginning to bleed heavily from the doors and walls and even the floors. My nose had become numb to the smell of burning keratin and flesh and clothing. It seemed people preferred throwing themselves to the wind than dying pyre or by the noose of smoke.

            I couldn’t help but glance down at my arms. They were wrapped tightly around the window’s iron frame and my veins were slightly raised and pulsing violently. They skin was stippled ebony save for two pale scars, straight and true as a saber’s edge.  They were on both arms, stitched across the skin from the wrists to the curve of my elbows.

            With all of the weeping and the shrieking I couldn’t think straight. All it would’ve taken was a little pressure and a piece of glass. It was all right there, in front of me. I had the precision; I had the experience. 

            But I couldn’t do it.

            I began to wheeze over my tears. It was becoming harder to breath and harder to see as the smoke began to tendril its way out of the windows. I tried retreating back into the building, but people began to bum rush for air. They clawed atop one another -- on top of me – trying to escape the thickening void. The plaintive, disembodied cries of those too weak to fight for a place by the windows kept me from twisting back around. Somebody’s watch-wearing wrist hung about my head and the time was there, baring me in the face. I blinked heavily to get the soot out of my eyes.

            It was 10:28 when the world began to shudder.