Chapter One

THE DREAM WAS HIS, AND FOR YEARS IT WAS ALL HE HAD. EVEN much later, when he had about two of life’s little extras, he clung to it.

By the same token he never voluntarily woke himself out of it. Certainly its contents never shocked him awake. Even in the big house, when anguish and sex in the surrounding darkness attained the grunting arrhythmia of a stalled circus train, Pauley never awoke from his dream.

Pauley liked his dream.

“Life being what it is,” the artist Paul Gauguin is said to have said, “one dreams of revenge.” Ephemeral, fleeting, uncertain, rarely complete, practically unique revenge. Gauguin forgot to add that, life being what it is, revenge is a full-time proposition. Gauguin preferred pith to despair.

Having once attained revenge, with little or no hope of reattaining it, one re-dreams it. Just like sex, or freedom.

Pauley’s last year inside, an adjacent lifer picked a Sears Roebuck guitar, most nights. He was a farmer from Mississippi with a deep repertoire of what he called lights-out blues.

If you can’t do the time, boy

Don’t do the crime

All a them fine things

Git along fine without you

–so fine without you.…

The old man’s impeccable phrasing, ancient tone and unhurried restraint soothed all who heard him, and he never buzzed a string. The hacks liked his music, the weepers liked it. Even the crazies left him to sing in peace. His peace contributed to their peace, and helped them into the night.

Because life is the crime, boy

That the man done said you done

And living is the time, boy

You better have you some fun…

This hour was their ration of tranquility, watched over by the disembodied voice of an old black man, singing in the dark, who had killed his wife with a pitchfork. The whole cell block settled for the hour, if not the night, opened itself to what possibilities rest or sleep might hold, like a parched flower to dew. The old man was worth five or six hacks’ worth of security. Of all the prison years it was this last one, presided over by the guitarist, that Pauley considered rehabilitating.

Cause that mule be watching you, boy

It gonna kick you number one

Watching you down the line, boy

Gonna kick you fore you done.

That year, the dream came to him twice.

Preliminary scuttlings under the denim jacket folded beneath the ear, as of a trapped scorpion lending its mandibles to the certain prospect of weeviling up and out of the makeshift pillow, straight through the inner ear above: whispers along the seeping stones, breathing curtains, corpses tucking in their shrouds and muttering without embarrassment; freckled gourds with hovering eyebrows and cigar-like protuberances tilting over their cash, large bills first, small bills last–an excruciating unwind, a waning vigilance for someone who finally, rehabilitated, wants only to gamely slit IRS correspondence with measurable élan, if a dull knife, on Monday, even if he barely has the courage to force his metabolism past a coffee nudged with whiskey to stare down a mere bill for the electricity by Friday, unopened; but that’s in real time, outside time, digital time, countable time, future time–the dreamer’s full analog at the moment, sinking down through the barbed wires by which he will have to climb back in the morning, getting emotionally wet but achieving psychic weightlessness, becoming the vehicle fueled by the dream which is itself a product of the combustion of pain and desire.

Until, sometimes with an overture and bucolic transition, as formerly the bluesy prelude, just as often without, but always unpredictable and altogether infrequently–such dreams are only necessary, after all, when you need reminding that there’re some things you can’t erase without doing damage to the medium on which the erasable is recorded, smell of burning meat–perhaps once a year, and that unique year twice, the dream arrives, already in progress.

Not many people smell things in their dreams, but Pauley does, with exceptions by which he is wont to thank his fate for neglecting to impose the rule. For fate read psychic metabolism, that hasty thing half-cobbled at one’s conception, and cobbling thenceforward whether one pays attention or not, whether it’s ever finished or not. Though, as science must no doubt someday prove, if the thing is ever thoroughly cobbled the process will continue cobbling, spinning like a lobotomized spider on the ever-thickening lid, just as inexorably, heedless of and despite achievement, as incomprehensibly as it excreted and stitched and spun the contents–until the chrysalis becomes the grave. Makeup is the term most often used, psychic makeup. As if mere paint can poison as well as poison can paint. Ah: painterly insight, Gauguin again. There’s a fine envelope.

His father has beaten him with the strop. It’s not a strop precisely, though it’s used for stropping. His father was a straight razor man. He used to say, around the barber shop, “Mind the chin.” He’d say, “I’m a straight-razor man myself, and I mind the chin,” speaking to the ceiling through a mound of lather. There were a great many things to hate about him, and that he was from Brooklyn yet affected an English accent was one of them. And your fine son over there, would palliate the barber, absent-minding the chin with the same vacancy of eye congruent to the minding of bodily functions. “The kid?” sneered the father. “Never mind the razor, but don’t spare the strop! Ah, hargh, heough, cheoughghgh…,” and that laugh engendered of tobacco, whiskey, and the fumes risen off the galvanizing tank would quickly veer from its gravelly rattle to a phlegmy spew, flecks of shaving soap erupting ceilingward. From very early on, as Mark Paulos watched the senior Paulos get his face scraped, to the latter a pinnacle of shabby luxury dating from the days when a barber was as likely to perform a surgery as a shave, with not dissimilar instruments, jokes, flourishes, and a vacancy of eye inseparably construed in the old man’s mind with a wobbly revisionism of his own youth, a lambent haze of benevolently tilting architecture wherein goats pastured right next to the garage out of which his own father collected small bets and shined some gangster’s Packard, in the days when gangsters were employers and money was semoleons; from very early on Mark Paulos had waited tensely for the moment when his father would make this stupid joke, hoping, willing against hope that, as the barber leaned away from his work to avoid the flecks of lather he might, indeed, mark the chin deeply, with a red fissure down to its Adam’s apple, and thus spare him, Mark Paulos, the weekly re-seeding of the brutality, and, much later, the dream.

For to Mark Paulos it was no joke, that business about sparing the razor and not the strop.

And it wasn’t really a strop because, as a rule, strops came without buckles, whereas a belt, which the strop really was, came with a buckle, a heavy rectangle of beveled brass. And there was nothing like a buckle, the senior Paulos had discovered, for cracking the meager defense afforded by the knuckles of the little fisted hand likely to be at least tentatively proffered by almost anyone having the post-cognitive data-structures lashed out of him by a strap of tanned leather.

The architectonic of the dream apparently programmed as unnecessary so humiliating a preliminary as to re-enact or even fictionalize an actual beating. In every instance the fear welled intact, artesian, the act opened with pain and fear welded and ascendant, right down to the acrid taste of his own tears in the dreamer’s dreamed mouth. How many years since he had tasted awake the brine of his own tears in his own mouth!

The old man always made him stand in the door of the bathroom and watch the shave, afterward. If “Dad” was really fouled he wouldn’t even let the kid button up but stand there clutching his pants to his welting hips. Paulos senior was always fouled, as the years wore on, some days more than others, but he was never too fouled to administer the weekly beating, and never so unfouled that he wouldn’t apply himself and the strop with a thorough severity that, every time, quickly had the kid whimpering and thrashing like a leashed ferret on locoweed, in advance. Staying him was out of the question. One summer night a large woman from next door, firebird-kimonoed, receiving in her quest for coolness not fresh air but the mendicant screams of a child and no longer able to stand them, had burst into the tiny bathroom demanding to know what beast was it, that could sustain and prolong such pathetic hollering from a child. Gleaming with perspiration, himself naked to his waist, astonished into a momentary if thunderous silence by the temerity of her interruption the beast abruptly identified itself, backing her into the hallway as it did so, and with a roar planted its belted fist squarely in the middle of the poor woman’s forehead with such force that she assumed the momentary weightlessness of poleaxed bovinity, and with such vector that, dropping, she launched backwards, straight past the door she called her own, and down a flight of graffitied stairs onto the filthily carpeted landing, whereon she thumped like a bale of gas-station dipstick wipers, kicked out the back of a delivery truck every Tuesday, there to beach among the litter of syringes, styrofoam, birth-control devices, cigarette ends, cardboard and listless newsprint, pink and inert.

Mark Paulos endured the balance of the stropping, sure the beast had killed her. But when “Dad” opened the front door an hour later to sport his clean shave and paycheck and guilt-quilled catharsis down to the corner gin mill, there was no sign of a corpse, if such it had been. Even the trash on the landing seemed to have redistributed itself, and now appeared as evenly and thickly undisturbed as the dust on a neglected terrarium, containing but a subtle aberration of stillness. Thirty-five and forty years later Pauley could plainly recall young Mark Paulos gazing through his pain down the staircase, marveling at the transience of life.

The mildew, the fouled water, the whiskey breath, the patronymic sweat, the shaving soap–these odors would stay with Mark Paulos forever. Perhaps twenty cheap apartments with smaller and smaller bathrooms–though never so small as to inhibit a beating–chained through his mind like battles in war, stemmed from the motherless nebula like some insidious creeping plant, blooming every Friday. He had that peculiar patent of memory whereby musicians and idiots are able to recall the serial order of apparently unrelated events, harmonious or merely numeric, written or heard or seen. But he also had a sense, not quite prescient, hardly clairvoyant, but definitely anticipatory, that informed him finally, upon moving into yet another rancid crib with one window and its own private if smaller mildewed bath, that this one, this bathroom, might be the last to host his father’s rank discipline.

In his dream, enriched by the passage of time and the dream’s cathartic office, the anticipation came up sweet and obvious like, say, blood in the sun-streaked brine above a shark attack. By and through whose biochemistry the narration flows, the little boy dreams himself weeping and short of breath as he watches his father reattach the strop to its nail adjacent the sink. The taste of tears lingers somewhere beneath the plane of the point of view; but the strop is hot with the pain of another. Tempered thus, it takes his father a lesser forever than usual to coax an edge from it, onto his blade.

The stainless razor has stainless marquetry like piping outlining its nacre handle that gleams anyway in the yellow light. Steam rises from the water drilling into the sink. Always, always, when searching for a new apartment, the standard was hot water, hot water instanter from the lavatory tap. Never mind the roaches, the jukebox in the bar downstairs, the brittle newspaper stuffed in the hole in the window glass, the mythological stains on the striped mattress, the wallpaper bursting through its own orchids like a vivisection of a mad horticultural mind and the water coming down webbed capillaries behind it, the screams from beyond the ceiling: hot water instanter, I’m a straight-razor man. Instanter was the word his father used, English accent and all. Some landlords shrugged, some rolled their eyes. Others showed him the fetid ‘studio’ adjacent the water-heater’s closet at the end of the hall and clinched the deal. From then on, the hot water whined from its pipe before the strop was unwound from the fist, its ends reversed and the buckle hung from its nail. If Eric Hoffer, San Francisco’s waterfront philosopher and spasmodic Calvinist, thought the nail on which hangs the broom immortal, he should have contemplated the nail on which hung the strop. Trans-dimensional nail? Nail that finites the soul? When a threshold is the trans-axial thickness of a nail, what’s the difference between the expectation of pain and the real thing? The nail on which the strop hangs: the nail of quite an ordinary fatalism: the nail circumrotated by Möbius. Think of the nail as One: since All is One there’s Nothing left over: except Pain. Like the lysergic pinwheel from which depointillates all phenomenology, Mark Paulos’ entire juvenile world devolved upon that nail and its strop. Fired by pain out of Friday, sometime between Monday night and Tuesday morning his determined arc mysteriously and ineluctably reversed, trajecting him back toward Friday upside down and centripetal. When the strop left its nail a sulfurous stench smoked the child’s nostrils, acrid, debased, intoxicating, pumped instanter by cellular contraction. When the strop rearrived upon its nail, the rhythmic shnik shnik of the denouement began to emanate from it, and a vegetative humidity billowed through a child’s senses like fog in a bad movie: infusing a warm, uncaring abatement, like senile urine wicked by cotton diapers. Giddy relief, suffused with despair.

The dream had steam, too. And odors. It had the shnik shnik shnik. It had the taste of tears. Pain informed it with color and accuracy. It had other sounds as well, of the toilet which never quite ceased its sighing, and, at the last station, an intermittent sizzle whenever his father’s swinging arm brushed the frayed cord which dipped down from the unfrosted bulb over the mirror and shot up like a hummingbird’s J-stroke of love to a switched socket high in the ceiling; and the dream had visions forever burned onto the retina, written once, recited often, from the resultant blinking on and off of the light as the unsynchronized blows nicked it and fell, nicked it and fell. But most strangely of all, unlike many of its terrifying brethren, through its unique, maternal clairvoyance, the dream instilled confidence in Pauley. One wouldn’t want to wake screaming before a happy ending, would one? An unfortunate miscue. Over the years this foreknowledge had achieved its own luminosity. The awe which had grown out of anticipation–for Mark Paulos and his father lived in this last apartment unnaturally long, nearly six months–as if, in fact, there were plenty of time, if at young Mark’s expense, for the beatings had entered a crescendo of virtuosity–until, his mind casting itself forward, toward some unrealized and unknowable promise, in which he had absolutely no reason to hope, except that but for this hope there was no possibility of salvation, unless it was the remote fantasy that he might someday grow old enough to buy a gun, Mark Paulos was practically able to endure the beating almost as if the ritual itself were some kind of door to which he not exactly held the key, but to which he was betrothed, a bargain to which his suffering firmly bonded him, and made good his half of the deal–whatever such a deal was.

In other words, Mark Paulos was becoming virile with the rosy potential of retribution. And this was a sublime if lesser sentiment offered him by the dream, of lesser sublimity than its artful recapitulation of the facts of his father’s death.

The severity of the beatings merely served to seed the boy’s hope. His suffering became a form of nourishment. His whimpers became sighs, his screams diminished to groans, his begging ceased altogether. To elicit the smallest particle of obvious distress his father had increasingly to summon a concentration increasingly beyond his focus, a strength beyond his scope.

Having underestimated the effect of his own rage upon himself, as well as that of the two glasses of whiskey he’d consumed en route to the weekly ritual, not to mention the progressive enervation engendered by twelve years, on and off, at the galvanizing plant, Paulos senior finished the latter beatings winded and half-delirious; and his labored breathing almost inevitably figured as an outrider of the dream’s climax. Much as it betrayed, at the time, to the winded old man as he stared down into the expressionless eyes of his son, their animating force retreated to infinity long since, that some day he was going to have to kill this boy before the boy killed him.

Laboring, sweating profusely in his sleeveless undershirt, the old-before-his-time man thrust the child aside and took up his glass from the counter. With two swallows he finished it, contemplating the silently weeping boy in the doorway as he drank, breathing heavily into the mouth of the glass as it enveloped his own, the buckle of the dangling strop clinking on the crazed tile at his feet. With each application of swill to his salivating throat the back of his balding head brushed the electric cord. It was an old cord. The twisted pair of cloth-covered strands glowed in the backlight cast by their bulb. Filaments stood off the insulation like hair off the segmented tail of a scorpion. With each contact of the glistening pate the socket buzzed in its luminous cloak of steam above the mirror.

Chapter Two

HEY, KID? NEVER MIND THE RAZOR, BUT DON’T SPARE THE strop! Ah, hargh, heough, cheoughghgh…,” was what Pauley remembered when he was awake. But in the dream he heard only the laugh, never the old man’s voice. Nor the brush whip the lather in the cup, nor saw it applied to the rubicund face. Not in the dream. But at odd times in waking life he heard certain of these sounds–often, in fact. The flap of a pigeon’s wings, as it dropped off a building ledge and fell toward the pavement, just before it managed to reverse the plummet and veer up on the afternoon westerly, for example, might not sound exactly like a horsehair shaving brush spinning a lather off a cake of perfumed soap in the bottom of an old coffee cup. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the sound, catching Pauley unaware, didn’t always take him back to that bathroom, but it was always capable of it. Some cortical mechanism–possibly his imagination, possibly something much more ruined–took care of the rest.

“Ah, hargh, heough, cheoughghgh.…” The convulsion had caused the old man to grip the edge of the counter until he caught enough breath to spit into the sink. Cigarettes, whiskey, and the fumes off the galvanizing tank had added up over the years to emphysema, but it wasn’t killing him fast enough to suit anybody, least of all but one himself. He gulped the rising steam as if it were but a poor substitute for the kicky vapors of his occupation, capable of rusting the tissue of a lung the moment they kissed it, and took the last swallow of whiskey. Then the glass was empty.

“Up to the Mark,” he’d always said. But in the dream Pauley never heard it. He saw the old man’s hand, holding out the empty water glass to his son, the man not looking at his son but at his own reflection in the steaming mirror, gauging the incremental plummet of the decrepitude sampled there, adding, “Hargh, heough, cheoughghgh.…”

Holding up his pants with one hand the boy followed the glass held by the other, like a small acolyte gripping alb and chalice. Through the sitting/lying/drinking/rumpus/sleeping/copulating/blaspheming/eating room and into the kitchenette, where he paused to gingerly rebuckle his pants over his welted thighs and hips, casting the while a rueful glance at the coverless Jack London omnibus on a chair by the door. Though he was nine he had to stand on the chair, omnibus set reverently aside, and use both hands to pour the whiskey out of the squat long-necked gallon flask with the uninspired label, winged molting grouse or blasted castle, that landed recharged every three or four days like a mortar shell in their domestic foxhole. Though he’d commonly see a half-ounce of the bright fluid run along the old man’s cheek and into his ear, the boy had been slapped silly for spilling a single drop. Latterly and often as he poured whiskey for the old man too stupefied to get it for himself the boy would wonder, if the tree fell on the trapper for beating the sled dog in the Jack London story, why didn’t some recompense of equal force precipitate upon the head of his father? A lamppost would do. Surely there’d been plenty of cause for some discernible swing of the pendulum, if only since he’d taught himself to read? Otherwise he’d soon lose faith in that particular creed. Had nature become so unbalanced, later in the century?

He retraced his steps with the half glass of whiskey. He’d learned not to fill it to the brim, because his father liked to cover the back of his throat with a quantity of whiskey without rinsing his face with it.

At the bathroom door the acolyte with lowered eyes proffered timidly the chalice to be snatched and drained by the ordained voracity. But the glass was not taken from his hands.

For a long time nothing happened.

Halfway through that lapse of time, the dream took up its narrative again.

On the wet floor before him, Mark Paulos could see his father’s naked feet. There were black hairs in the valleys between the fine bones of the man’s bulbous toes, crabbed from years of gripping the scaling diamond plate of the catwalk. As he watched them the light wavered and dimmed through yellow to brown and back. Somewhere above, water ran into the sink. He became gradually aware of another sound, distinct from but harmonious with the running water. Years later, when big-house procedure routed him to his first dentist, Pauley discovered a cognate sound, as whimsically capable as the pigeon’s wing-flap of sending him the fifteen twenty-five thirty-five years in an instant, gas or no gas: the intermittent gurgle of the little tube the hygienist used to vacuum saliva and tooth chips from beneath a tongue. It sounded like an aquarium aerator, too. But at the time he heard his father’s throat emitting it, dentists and captive fish were foreign to his experience.

Still the glass of whiskey was not taken. With great care, slowly, the boy allowed his glance to climb the leg of his father’s pants. Two ornate pot-metal pulls on the vanity cabinet’s skew doors appeared, then the tiled edge of the counter; followed by beltless pant-loops, the skinny undershirted potbelly belying the vertical suspender, the strop on the wall beyond. Steam. An armpit gushing hair. The grizzled underside of his father’s twisted, incompletely lathered face, the left arm cantilevered left away from it, high over Mark’s upturned gaze, the right arm angled toward the opposite wall, above the strop.

And the strange guttering sound, like the aerator on a tank in which hovered a pair of carp, a Siamese beta, guppies, some kind of angelfish, as if the aerator itself were the motor of their suspension.

The father had pulled taut the lathered skin of his left jowl to scrape beneath it, and he should have been squinting into his reflection beyond the steam to guide the delicate pass over the jugular. But the father wasn’t shaving. Nor was he moving purposefully at all. He was shivering, as if cold. Yet he sweated. Like an arrow shot straight up some time ago that’s just now returned to bury its point in a stump, his father stood at a quivering, trembling halt.

And he wasn’t boozily squinting, either. He was staring at himself, straight into the mirror, eyes wide, eyebrows high. The razor’s beautifully honed blade hovered below his gaze, bright at his cheek, a light in his hand, his forefinger laid along its vector, the metal incongruous against the lathered flesh like the tin band that encircles the ankles of a supermarket chicken.

Mark Paulos had never really seen or conceived of his father as unmoving. The senior Paulos was a restless, dissembling, wracked, exhausted, permanently annoyed creature, kept thin by his nerves, who always had a cigarette going, a drink, a complaint, a spasmodic curse or gesture, a blow for the unaware, and two for those who expected but one. Yet here he stood in the dream, as but once before, not quite silent, not quite unmoving; in memory he vibrated audibly like the tine of a tuning fork amid the gurgle of the sink drain, the whine of the running spigot; and the mild bubbling–which young Mark at last discerned was coming from his father’s mouth, with occasional bubbles of spittle, like the spout of a pump that’s lost its prime.

Mark stood there, still holding the glass of whiskey. Nothing happened. After a while, he gently pressed the whiskey glass against his father’s hip. The gurgling raised pitch, and young Mark quickly pulled the glass away. The gurgling resumed its lower pitch. His father did not otherwise react. Steeling himself, Mark touched the glass against his father’s hip and pressed again. Again the guttering raised its pitch, nearly to a hiss. He pulled the glass away. The guttering again. Once more he pressed the glass against the hip. Once again the hiss. Now he modulated the touching with a crude rhythm. The guttering raised to the hiss, fell away again, increased in pitch, lowered in pitch, raised and lowered, raised and lowered.…

A musty sharp odor interrupted his game, and young Paulos’ bare toes warmed as his father’s urine welled over the tiles beneath them. Looking down, he saw the last of the evacuation gently cascade over his father’s ankle below the soaking cuff. He stepped aside and watched, fascinated, as the stream slid eighteen inches over the floor to the doorway and disappeared beneath the threshold. This took a minute. He tried to remember whether he knew anybody who frequented the establishment downstairs. Then, as the thickness of the urine diminished and ceased to flow, before he was really conscious of what he was doing, Mark chased its remnants over the tiles with the whiskey. A turn of the glass and a sweep of his hands and it was done. A barroom reek lifted from the floor.

This was more whiskey than he’d ever spilled in his life. The boy reflexively cringed out of his reverie, anticipating the reprisal in the flat of his father’s hand. But none came. Only sound moved through the little room: the intermittent spitting from the light socket, the hiss of water, the whining spigot, the gulping drain, the guttering from his father’s throat. It was as if he alone were tentatively alive in an inanimate tableau advertising eminently replaceable bathroom fixtures.

Now he saw the cause of his father’s immobility, though he didn’t understand it at the time. It was the wire that draped down from the high ceiling and back up to the light over the mirror. This brought current to his father, who’d caught a section of the wire in the crook of his elbow as with customary flamboyance he’d reached up and over to the opposite side of his face, to draw taut his flaccid cheek for the razor’s work. The rounded bend of a small copper pipe jutted out of the grout in the corner between the floor and the wall, in which his father had lodged his foot to steady himself. On the other side of the wall this half-inch pipe supplied fresh water to the toilet tank. The stub and little soldered copper elbow nestled beneath the naked arch of his father’s instep with the patient eternity of a millipede beneath a rock, providing a perfect ground for the 120 volts and fifteen or twenty amperes now coursing from the transformer atop the pole in the street in front of the apartment house to the weather head at its eastern gable, down four stories to its basement service box, through the Indian-head nickel placed beneath the blown fuse in its socket, up through stout tube-and-post ten-gauge copper wire to the octal box in a sagging plaster ceiling and thence down through the twisted filaments to the inside of Mark’s father’s convulsed elbow, where it evenly divided its attentions between the porcelain light socket and the direct route to earth, through Pauley’s father’s musculature. Theirs was probably the only cheap apartment in the city with a dedicated circuit for the bathroom light, some landlordly infrastructures are positively creamed in benevolence, some bathrooms as it were customized by Destiny.

But Mark didn’t at the time wonder over the mechanics of affliction-saving devices. An old con with a contractor’s license doing twenty-five to life for electrocuting his partner would later explain to him the principle of grounding. What the child was wondering at the time was whether he might be able to pack the tattered Jack London omnibus–a tome big enough to double as a wheel chock for a dump truck–and get the hell out of his father’s life forever while the getting was looking possible. He would need money. Money, it being payday, was only as and if ever in his father’s pocket. And if he knew little enough about the mysterious force that had immobilized his father, Mark was intuitively afraid of touching him with his bare hands, even to the extent of going through the pockets of the man who stood impotent, humming like the faring on an irrigation pump. A bit of smoke rose off the connection, too, where the frayed wire was folded in the crook of the elbow, and, very faintly, a distant sizzle came, with the smell of burning meat. To touch his father at all under any circumstances was a matter of revulsion. Now it was even more out of the question, like trying to pick up a convulsing snake. Mark could see that the wire was probably at the root of the mystery, that the connection was delicate at best, that to go through his father’s pockets might disturb a rather tenuous equilibrium, and thus he determined finally to savor, for as long as it cared to last, the delicious suspension of the family drama.

Escape offered little hope. Like most abused children Mark had no reason to expect that life away from the paternal hammer might be any different than the regime he’d been taught to endure, under which he’d learned a thousand little tricks to make his life more tolerable. With a few exceptions, like the weekly beating, he’d learned how to cushion, soften, de-emphasize or sublimate the worst of his father’s rages, if not to avoid them altogether. School, for example, had begun to take up an increasing amount of time. His father hadn’t seemed to notice the diversion, so long as it was free, and the old man enjoyed having the apartment to himself. Often Mark would manage to arrive home long after drink had eroded his father’s capacity for anything but randomly effective violence, or after he’d given up waiting to dole it out to his son and gone out to the taverns looking to exchange a few blows with his mates. At such times whatever tawdry apartment they lived in would become Mark’s own. This is when he learned to cast his mind deep into fantasy, with a little help from a kindly author–Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Alexander Dumas. He learned to keep his own counsel. Left to his own devices, he might have made something of himself.

And these thoughts were leading him gradually to the conclusion that, in spite of everything, life had somehow assumed a manageable if excruciating modality over the past couple of years–more than one-fifth his earthly tenure. All things considered, why should a kid venture out into the world? If his father’s experiences were anything to go by, the most he could look forward to was a more protracted beating, in the form of some kind of stinking job.

But now came the twist of fate that plummeted the boy into his orphanage years, juvenile hall, jail, and prison, the years that engendered a character, and a criminal.

His father began to cut his own throat.

As young Pauley mulled his fate in the doorway, his father’s razor hand began to move with an eerie fluttering motion, like a bird caught in a bird-spider’s web–a bird with a sharp stainless steel tail, unlikely to be trapped for long. Quivering as if caught in a field of unpredictable magnetic power, the blade began to flutter and saw, back and forth, across Paulos senior’s cheek: flutter and saw, saw and flutter, utterly mechanistic, each short arc as if guided by some unseen pendulum within the hand, disassociated from the otherwise strangely unmoving forearm and wrist. The net effect was as if the razor were making the deliberate hackings necessary to chop cocaine (an audio cue that would join the pigeon, the fish tank, the dental hygienist’s vacuum pump, and anyone spitting through a crack between their teeth, which sounded almost exactly like the loose connection in the porcelain light fixture, as ping-pong balls among Pauley’s associative mousetraps)–a chopping often performed on some hard nonporous reflective surface, like a mirror. Except that there was no cocaine. There was shaving soap, and though reflected in a mirror, the actual chopping surface was a man’s actual cheek. Each skew of the razor sliced into flesh, the hand descending the while, so that a series of smiling slits appeared in the foam on Mark’s father’s cheek, each a little lower and a little longer than the one flooding above it.

instanter?

But the dream, intent as it was on useful psychological invigoration, dispensed with impious reflection and zoomed in on the severing of the artery which, in due course, deprived Mark’s father of his life. The strange fluttering and sawing mechanism which had been his father’s hand simply continued carving its arcs down the man’s cheek, right out from under the other hand, which still held the jowl taut, the head tilted, to the purpose. It looked like a pose evolved to answer the necessity of cutting a throat with the least amount of trouble. The hand worked much like a swallow its field at dusk, made a sweep in one direction, fluttered, then came back slightly further down, shredding the cheek, the jowl, and the throat as it descended. The hatching lines of blood soon ceased to be discernible as lines, as the older upper sources flooded the lower newer ones like seepage nurturing moss on an old stone wall. And long before this process had attained its fruition Mark Paulos the younger had come to realize that his hatred had found a focus; that remorse, penance, guilt, regret, penitence, anguish, reconciliation, atonement, attrition, contrition, regret, sorrow were being distilled, even as flecks of foam reddened by their common blood ticked against the countertop and the mirror, and that he was receiving from this new liquor some kind of satisfaction or nourishment of the type usually attributed to a square meal, or confined to dreams.

Perhaps trees two hundred years old really did fall on men who beat dogs without cause or mercy. Perhaps man had adapted to the exigencies of the treeless bathroom, and nature along with him.

The lifeless progenitor remained vertical for some time. Mark never stopped watching. On the wall beyond his father’s husk the leather strop symbolically pulsed between the electrical poles like a flayed conjunction, like the Oregon Trail on an old map, connecting a new world with a newer one. Then the cadaver sagged into a crimson reverie, vertical to horizontal, with a pop and a tinkle and a flash as it pulled the wire and the socket and the bulb down with it.

Among the many odors flirted a hint of burning meat, nature’s recording medium. Mark found himself still holding the empty whiskey glass. Now he stepped over the extended treacherous arm, set the glass on the counter, and turned off the hot water. A different warmth pooled along the edges of his bare feet. He backed two steps beyond the threshold and waited.

After four minutes in near darkness the corpse emitted an appalling, life-like sigh.