Paper Kites

There are no answers in the wind, no replies when he speaks to the darkness, no voices from man or God, and he cannot see. Beyond the mirror and outside himself, there is a lost world of things he’s known and things he’s loved and things he must never forget - snowflakes and silversides, sycamore spores blowing on the wind, little brown snakes coiled in the Artemisia, black spiders on pink Mimosa blossoms casting out long strands of glowing silk to unknown branches a universe away from what they know. There are fragments. There are memories. There are collections of things, of sign-posts, of landmarks, of all those moments that make up a man and make up a woman and make up a life. And from those visions and from those places there remains an echo, the voice of a boy. It is a voice that persists, a voice he must answer to, for it is the he that was, the he that floats, the he that drifts, the he that still remembers all those nameless souls he pulled from the river and covered with blue tarps in the cold mists of Brooklyn.

Whose face do I see in the black-water? Whose voice do I hear in the rain?

Francis DeLessi. Little Francis. Little Frank. Remember that boy. Remember his big, brown eyes, and his long, curly lashes. Remember his face. Like a painted portrait of a Venetian prince. Never forget that once blessed child, who had such smooth, olive skin, and a delicacy about him, a fragility, a radiance that brought smiles to the faces of the elderly and playful winks from auto mechanics and beat-cops. He had the soul of an angel, and the hands of a saint. He held the hosts for Father Donnelly in the morning time. He lit the censor. He held the wine and the cup. And he could sing. Always in that time there was music in his heart. He whistled strong and sure like an old man the tunes of old men and he had ways about him that seemed odd for a child - he was a bird watcher, he cared for pond turtles and tropical fish, he carved zoo animals from blocks of wood and would often be found speaking aloud to trees.

In that time he was seeing. He lived in a world of his own, a world of blind faith and white magic, where he was ever dazzled by the small amidst the large, awash in a dominion of color and gold sparkle delights. He owned the purple sunrise. He owned the blue expanse of days, where all was bright and shiny and speckled silver like pumpkinseed bellies turning in the sunny shallows for his eyes alone. Glowing. Everything was glowing, like the gemstone green of a leopard frog where it crossed the border of its golden eye, where private sunsets flared with crimson fire and indigo flash. He dreamed and he dreamed. He remembered every thing he saw. Every flower. Every pebble. Every smile. What glowed for his eyes, translucent and miraculous in those places where butterfly wings, and wildflowers and endless moments filled with dancing light were true? Everything. Everything.

In that time there was home and heart and no other place. No other boy. He was alone and he was proud of his hands. His hands could work a sort of magic. His hands could touch things and make them whole. He would build things of great beauty, with his hands, and bring others to back to prime function. He could tune small engines or fashion from wood and paper objects of simplicity and grace. A boy who can build is a boy who can live. A boy who can feel within wood the force of life cowed and brought to serve is a boy worth saving, a boy worth remembering, just as he remembers himself now, looking back through time through the eyes of a man. He could make it live again, the flesh of trees, and he could hear their voices. He could hear the trees. All children can.

He looks back and tries to see where it all went wrong. He thinks there might be clues hidden somewhere deep inside a memory he can no longer recall so he goes there nightly, back to those places where everything shined. He dozes in the middle of his shift, in the middle of the Bronx, in the front seat of an unmarked car that might as well be marked because everyone knows who he is but himself. A cop. A man who sees the bad parts of men. A man paid to mediate the sorrows, ignore the pain, and relive the worst moments of all those lives that become the worst moments of his own life, so that there is no distinction between the outside and the in, the other or the self. All you see is all you are. So what do you do when all you see is weakness and sin? You stop seeing. You turn your eyes in. You look back to what you know will always be there for you when you need strength amidst the madness of the moment. You live in your memories. You read the literature of your soul.

He closes his eyes on the bench-seat of the Crown Victoria, he puts his feet up, his head back, but he does not sleep. He drifts. He hovers in the spaces between the world of the streets and the world of his forgotten dreams. And he sees again. He sees the beginning, and the boy that he was. He sees himself, holding a galvanized steel watering can in a patch of tomatoes that are ripe and swollen and split in some places, oozing clear pulp. He can smell the lush basil growing nearby and hear cicadas ticking like slow clocks, the way they do in the worst of the August heat. He sees that same boy hunched over a lawnmower, removing wet clumps of grass from the blade with a big screwdriver, he sees him sitting alone in a canoe on a dark-bottomed salt creek just past dusk with the paddle dripping behind him and a bucket full of blue crabs, he sees him slightly older, slightly taller, pumping gasoline at a Sunoco station in the dead of winter with the slow ding, ding, ding of the old analog pump amidst the smell of mufflers and dirty snow. He sees that boy, almost grown now, working past midnight at a Manhattan bistro where he was fond of washing impossibly large pots, he sees him when he was a wood carver at a chair factory in Long Island City working the lathe in his safety glasses with his hair hanging in his eyes, and then, he sees him as a boat mechanic at the Green Point marina where he had a special knack for Evinrude motors and patching gouges in Fiberglas sailing craft. So many jobs. So many places. So many things that he used to do with his hands. Drifting, always drifting, he never felt at home until he heard the call of the ocean, and the beckon of wind. He heard the cry of the gulls. Something was waiting. Something drew him away from his old life, from his old self, and set him on a new path. It was a woman, as it should have bene, and what drew her to him were the things he could do with his hands.

He would build kites out of newspaper and balsam wood and fly them at Coney Island, with a fresh pack of Marlboros and an Igloo cooler filled with Schaffers, and a half-pound of bologna sliced thin and rolled into dozens of little tubes he’d eat slowly as he watched his hand-crafted birds soar and dance and dive until the beer was gone and the kites broke apart and fell into the sea. He did this every day unless it rained but it did not rain much in that summer. Most days were clear and hot and the beaches were full of spectators who marveled at his birds. He could build birds and watch them fly. He could make them dive and swoop. He could make them soar. It was a fine time to be living, on such long, sweltering days.

It was on such a day that the girl came. She appeared on the beach as if washed up upon it by the sea itself, and she seemed to move with that same ebbing and flowing motion - wavy, smooth, curvy like a mermaid, so that when he first saw her in the distance he thought of the glowing Rhodes, daughter of Poseidon, her long hair dark and shiny, falling past her shoulders to a small waist which flared out onto hips that spoke of a great capacity to bear endless beautiful boys. She was barefoot and she had beautiful toes with the nails painted the dark red of a living lobster shell, and she wore a transparent shift the color of the Verrazano Bridge, a teal green that changed with the moving light and set off her eyes which were a pale in the distance, and when she drew near he saw that the strange glow there was the stark blue of a cloudless winter sky. And then she was standing before him. She stopped to regard his kites. There were three aloft in that moment and they rattled and wavered, throwing hard black shadows at their feet that skittered on the sand like bats. The best part of your life can be distilled into a single moment in time.

But what is a life before there is death? A dream. A fantasy. You sleep and you run, and you laugh and you sing, and you marvel at the wonders of the living world. You hold serpents and songbirds with equal tenderness, and climb to the top of every tree you can because you can. You tread lightly on the wet beachhead at low tide searching for the geysers of pisser-clams and dig sandworms up for bluefish bait. You stare back at the cold yellow stars with a glorious longing in your heart. You whistle softly in the morning. You draw fantastic dragon-like creatures and rocket-ships with the nub of a pencil and create for yourself a simple world of your own, on paper. You imagine you are the only one that matters. You pretend that nothing beyond your paper world and tree-fort universe and all your secret tidal inlets is real. You see nothing but beauty yet you hear contradictions. You hear about horrors in places like Cambodia and Vietnam but those are merely whispers in your dream-world. The people you know are good, the people in the little Brooklyn neighborhood, where the closest you came to the true nature of man was when you discovered your grandfather’s hidden book of photographed atrocities from the time of Hitler and the Nazis, when you first saw those unbelievable piles of things that were supposed to be people, that were people, an impossible entanglement of skeletal dolls whose dead eyes had somehow retained a living quality that spoke to you across time and physical space, of ugliness, of Godlessness, of cruelty and evil, when you saw this, you felt the metamorphosis that was boy becoming man, you felt the change, the end of the child, the end of yourself, yet it did not come crashing down in one dramatic moment, it was instead a seep of poison that you would never purge, or ever lose and that would spread like a lazy cancer every time you saw a reminder of a life lost to the ways of Cain, as your mother used to say. A life taken, stolen. A life. Not just a body. A galaxy. A spinning collection of loves and laughs and loss and innumerable golden moments strung together like a fabric of stars rushing blindly toward some mysterious rapture. And suddenly it’s gone, and there’s nothing left but a curious vestige of those moments, calcified like a nautilus shell lying there on its side, beautiful and vacant, like the eyes of your friend, Izzy Ruiz, your partner. Empty, like the hands of Charmagne Robinson who fell from the bridge, right through your hands. Hollow, like the belly of Boo-Dylan Jones. Nameless, unknowable, unrecognizable as the first John Doe, and the second John Doe, and the Jane Doe and all the other Doe’s that you do remember and the Doe’s you don’t, until the little switch goes off in your head and their faces come back. It could be the smallest thing, like the smell of a musty pillow, or the sound of old bed springs, or the way your little boy is lying asleep in his bed in nothing but his Under-Roos with his arm twisted behind him and his mouth agape like a corpse, and then they come up, they emerge like dark things pulled from the bottom of a sump, like a crab trap when you take in that wet rope and begin to see it rise in the gloom and you strain to see if it’s just the fish heads inside or the shiny backs of the crabs themselves, and for a moment it’s only a glowing blur, until you see that it’s just the heads, the trap is empty, and you let it drop back down to the bottom to wait for those crustaceans that feed upon what dead will fall to the bottom of the sea. The faces from the vacant lots and the trash bags and from the river and from the book. They come on their own volition. They find him. Just like the book itself.

A book, for God’s sake. A thing made of paper. Photographs. Grainy images rendered in ink. That’s all they were but not all they would be. It was cold in that room where his grandfather hid it, and dark, and there were many other books there, and the kind of quiet you hear when you’re surrounded by books, and the light that you find in a roomful of books, a warm light from the leather and the wood and the angle of the sun, streaming in from high windows in the late afternoon. And in that light the book called to him the way books call to those who listen for them. The book spoke, and he heard it. It was black and bound in something like linen. It had sliver letters on its spine. It smelled musty and spewed a small cloud of dust that swirled up into the beams of light as he opened it. For a moment he was watching the dancing particles of dust. For a moment, he was living, and he was dust.

That was the beginning. The pictures. That was his first glimpse of death. They gave him faces that would stay with him, faces that came back every time he saw a body in the Bronx, and there were many. On that first night in the squad car when he found it, just a week out of the academy, that first one, lying there beneath an old mattress in a vacant lot like trash, he felt the old feeling come back. A cold panic. A dread sickness. It was a boy, eight years old, maybe ten, it was hard to tell. He could have been any age at all. His eyes were open. He was small and malnourished, there was a hollow below his ribs, there was his belly-button, a small nub of scar tissue where once he was connected to his mother, his hands, open, reaching, the palms of his hands, with the cris-crossed lines that spoke of a fate he didn’t have to read to understand. And it was his, this body. They gave it to him, as a welcome gift, they said, because he was new. They gave it to him to break his cherry, they said. His cherry. They made him stand by it all night, and he was ordered to guard it until the investigators could come. They laughed at this and they laughed at him and they joked about the child, his nakedness and the obvious neglect, and one of them tipped him back with the toe of his shoe and he flopped over like a weighted doll and stared up at the sky like he belonged to the moon.

And the images came back, the pictures from the book, they flashed through his mind like memories of some long forgotten tragedy which had befallen him, instead of a population of strangers not connected to his life by religion or blood. He saw then what he saw now. Human beings in desecration. Mom’s and Dad’s and sisters. Grandpas and Uncles. Schoolmates and old friends. Beach-goers and kite-flyers. Book readers. Soup-makers, kid brothers and English teachers, boys, girls, children of women, the wide spectrum of the living dead and the dead ever-living with holes in their skin like old furniture, torn open like wet sofa cushions, oddly colored like tenement wallpaper, or devoid of color like the white grass beneath a stone. They appeared unreal and other-worldly and he touched them with his fingers when no one was watching, when he was on stiff-duty, which is what they called it when you have to sit beside newly discovered body. At first he would touch them with his finger to see if they were real but later, for reasons he could not explain, he touched them with his open hand as if channeling something, as if calming them, or perhaps to see if he himself was real. And he was. And he wished he wasn’t.

That first time he first hit Ruth she was pregnant with Isaiah. He hit her with an open hand and she spun and fell to her knees on the kitchen floor, for asking about his day. How was the day hon? How was the day. He wanted to tell her first that it wasn’t a day, it was a night. Cops don’t have days. He wanted to ask her how she thought his day was considering he opened a suspicious package and found a severed head inside. He wanted to know if having almost saved a girl from jumping off a highway overpass to her death qualified as a bad day or just an almost good day. He wanted to tell her that where he worked there was never a good day. What did she expect him to say? How could he answer such a question? Good days are for milkmen and factory workers and office clerks. Is a good day a day in which you don’t get shot or don’t find a decomp or don’t see another junkie puke up blood on your shoes? That’s what he wanted to say, that’s what he should have said, that’s what he did say in effect when his hand shot out like a spring and smacked her across the mouth. She never asked him that question again but it didn’t matter. Not talking and not asking was not enough. Hit did it again. He did it intentionally. And he did it often.

Beating the woman he loved was not a habit that he acquired easily like cigarettes or cocaine. But violence was in his nature. It had to be. That was the only way to explain it. He never used his hands on another living being until he spent that first year in the Bronx. He never hit a man let alone a woman but he’d seen it done. He’d seen it done enough times to know that it was not an easy habit to break. His father once smacked a tooth right out of his mother’s mouth. It flew across the kitchen and pinged against the front of the oven door like it was shot from a gun. A trickle of blood ran from her lip but she did not cry out or make a sound. She wiped the blood off with the corner of her apron. She touched her mouth gently and her hand dropped to the cross around her neck, which she fondled for a moment before rising. He knew that in that moment she had prayed. She stood slowly and smoothed her skirt down with her hands and walked to the stove. She stood there for a moment, staring in through the dark glass of the oven door, running her fingers along her jaw. She bent over for the tooth and placed it in her apron pocket. His father was watching her. His hand, the hand that struck her, was resting on the table with the big class ring on his middle finger shining in the morning light like a golden eye. He tapped it on the table and she turned as if summoned by the sound of it. Francis saw them exchange a volume of understanding in a glance that lasted no more than a second. In that moment they acknowledged his existence, not just in the room but in their lives, and he knew that he alone held them together and that perhaps, he alone kept her alive. She glanced over at him quickly and he saw surrender and sadness in her eyes. His father looked at him too, but held his glance and addressed his mother with his eyes on the boy.

We’ll have no more of that, he said. Go on now and finish making your pies.

She fingered the tooth in her pocket and turned to her baking.

You, he said to Francis. Come straight home from school. And he left them. He picked up his keys and walked out the door.

They were moving. Again. But really they were fleeing. They were escaping the embarrassment of their secret; which was now out. Father Donnelly knew. The police knew. Their address was flagged from the domestic calls phoned in at least once a week by someone in the building. They called his father Sal instead of Mr. Delessi now. Sal, be reasonable. Sal, calm down. Sal was a name that everyone in the neighborhood now knew for all the wrong reasons and once again Sal was taking them away from something they had grown used to and loved.

His mother was praying. She stood at the stove fingering the crucifix that hung from her neck.

Lord, she said. Forgive him. He can’t help himself. Forgive him. The mark of Cain is the curse of man and it’s on us all, Francis, that mark is. That’s what that story means. You remember that. Remember your nature because Cain will come out of you like he came out in your father.

What kind of thing is that to say to a child? He was not even ten years old. You don’t tell a boy he’s got a Biblical killer waiting inside of him. You don’t tell a boy that he’s doomed. You don’t tell him that. Because he’ll never forget it. Ever. He’ll see it in his dreams. He’ll see Cain curled up inside of him like that fetus he saw in the cutaway pages of a science book. His mind will conjure images of larval-like creatures emerging from the split backs of insect-boys. He’ll lie awake and think of things like that. He’ll learn how to get by without any sleep, and eventually he’ll learn how to think of other things. He’ll drift and he’ll dream. He’ll remember only those things that he’s touched with his fingers. He’ll remember the stippled bark of a mimosa tree. He’ll remember the feathered breast of an injured wren. He’ll recall vividly the forearm of a teenage girl pocked with needle scars. He’ll see, over and over again, the falling of Charmagne Robinson, skinny and young, and light as a paper doll. He held her by the wrist. He held her for what seemed liked minutes with her tendons straining, and her eyes aflame as she swung out over the traffic below. And she spit at him. Fuck you, she said to him. Fuck you officer, let me go, let me go. She swung out and he held fast and she kicked her legs wildly, twisting, twisting, until she escaped his grasp and he felt her fingers slip right through his palm, he felt her nails in that final moment when she knew that she no longer wanted to let go.

Ruth didn’t want to let go. Even at the end. Even as she bled from the mouth at the foot of the bed laying the plans for their escape part of her was working against those plans, though she knew for a long time that she would one day leave him. She began to see the change in him long before he recognized it in himself. She saw it first in his eyes and then in his hands; which were what she had noticed about him on the beach at Coney Island. His hands are what drew her to him and they were what set him apart from other men, from other people. They were strong and beautiful. The were muscled and well-veined. And they moved, they were always moving, always grabbing hold of something, always darting toward something, pulling, prying, touching, making. He was happy when his hands were moving, when they were working, when they were involved in some kind of repetitive motion with a tool or a wooden cooking spoon or a long white string that led up to the sky and required his full attention and all the strength he had in his fingers, fingers that were thick yet perfectly proportioned to the rest of his hand, and calloused yet supple as the pocket of a well-worn glove. His fingernails were kept just long enough to peel paint chips from an old block of wood but not too long, not creepy, and not so they were painful when he touched her with the tips of his fingers the way he was fond of doing in the dark when she could not sleep, and sleep began to elude her more and more as he began to strike her with greater frequency in the days and weeks following his night alone with the little boy whose name she never knew, who’s existence she had never been made aware of, and who was Frank’s first in a long and never-ending line of unnamed dead to take on not just a name, but a whole existence, a whole life, as the facts came out he became a boy to him and later, much, much later, she learned that boy’s name was Boo Dylan Jones.

It had been her habit to lie awake, waiting for him to come home, and to lie with him at dawn with his hand in hers, or on her belly with her hand on top of his, guiding it to the places where Isaiah was moving inside so he could feel what she felt. And he loved that. He loved feeling the child inside her. He used to wake up at odd hours and feel for him. But not after Boo Jones. Not after those elbows and those knees and those feet could he stand to feel the same parts of his own child through her skin. It was like the book, the pictures in the book. Paper. Skin. Hands. His hands on her. His hands on the wheel of the Crown Vic, his hands on the radio, his hands at her throat, his hands on the knife in the belly of that gorgeous eight-point buck he bagged his first day out, his hands holding the wrist of that girl, Charmagne Robinson. Or was it Johnson? Or was it Jefferson? It was somebody’s-son, he held in his hands, just as those same hands held his son, the hands that once built spectacular kites, the hands that could hit a small, fragile woman, the hands that could gently cradle a sulphur-yellow butterfly long enough to show the boy the tiny orange spots that make it what it is – they are the same hands on the same man, instruments of hope and doom, the fingers that pull apart the seams of the animal, the fingers that splay the wings of Monarchs and run through the boy’s almond colored hair, those fingers, those fingers, those marvelous, terrible fingers that plucked guitar strings, that pull triggers, that pull kite strings to make them dive and loop, pull Francis, pull, hold the gun, hold the barrel flush Franky, push it close, what was the mass about today Francis? What did the priest say? Did you go to mass today Francis? Did you even go? You went. You held the cup with wine that is blood, you held the host that is flesh. Forgiveness delivered by mouth by hands that take the cup from his own – surely there is transference, from one set of hands to another, surely there is union, from a piece of flattened bread, a piece of a flattened lead, delivered through the mouth to the brain in a nanosecond. Instant salvation. One Hail Mary is all it takes to open that door. One small movement of one small finger. The soul outlives the hands. That’s what makes us human.

The soul outlives the hands. Your hands can save your soul. The hands that folded the kites and held the string now hold a gun that holds a tiny rocket with a nose-can of lead. A little rocket. Remember how you loved rockets? Up, up, up like a kite in the Coney Island wind. Remember when you used to hold her in your arms like she was the most precious thing ever created by God? Standing, swaying, her hands in your hands, the pull of the string. And oh how you held her. That young, young body pressed against you and vibrating alive and electric like the kites you made together from the morning’s New York Post, that hung above you, rapping loudly like sailcloth, like a snare drum, and her hair in your face smelling of ocean and Prell, and how you could almost feel the life that was living inside her, especially when she took your hand. When her hand guided your hand, and moved it, down and down to that warm round belly that you held with your fingers splayed as if it was a ball with a man trapped inside that was you, and how you felt that the string that was tied to the kite did not end there, at the kite, nor did it begin in your hand, it stretched all the way up beyond the sky, and all the way down below the sand, below the beach itself, so that you felt tied together to the world.

And in your dreams there are always the kites, the dancing gray birds, in your sleep, in the dark of the house that is empty now and forever because they left you, justly, alone, to feed off the misery of a thousand nights of fear, to feed off yourself and what you’ve become – another product of those streets that are rivers for all the broken hopes of a lost city in a decay that’s spread to your heart like some avian virus that will not relent until you’re as filthy dead as Boo Dylan Jones on the day you found him. Carrying that hot coffee in your hands, with a buttered sweet roll wrapped in wax paper in your hand, and the smell of wax paper, forever, and the three little holes there in his forehead, cheek and cheek, neatly triangular as if some bolts had merely been removed, and of course they had, the bolts were undone and lost, and you knew, even then, the struggle was over between the two yous. There would never be another paper kite again.

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