Sometimes Marco, in the heavy two o'clock, would groan to find himself awake once more, inside the heartsickening texture of the night, when what he wanted only was to rest his bones, or have the fullest use of them, or quiet them, obliterate rheumatic hurt, encumberment. Body was irrelevant but insistently obtrusive. His body, his, in all its ponderous, no longer supple flesh. Importunate. As always. Always that: a factory disgorging to his arteries its burden of disgust with self, a kind of slurry, clogging passages to vision where the splintered yellow overlaid the shadow just beneath. How did he dare to freight the canvas with the colors of his clumsy brush, his fingers, spatulate, skin cracked, screaming at him "Torturer! Why are you taxing us?"

He burrowed, tried to wind the ragged filaments of sleep around his knotted shoulders, remembering those years ago, as so often in these moments of the night, that prehistoric time when threads of sleep in all their ten year innocence had gathered to his agile fingers readily. His mother in the lamplight, kneeling, praying with him by the bed. "If I should die before I wake."

The light refracted by her eyes. Her pupils' luminosity, their chocolate depth, their shine, soft as flannel, like the bathrobe that she draped him in, her fingers fastening, pressing, tugging his belt, pulled him close to her. "Marco, Marco. Do you know I love you Marco, more than anything?" Her golden hair. "You are my life, my love." How he would fall asleep.

Did he weigh sixty pounds then with his legs like pistons racing after balls as though the street was surf and he was wind and sailing was his every day, his tack and veer darting through the corridors at school, the traffic of his ten o'clock? Quicksilver in his pirate days, he'd only sketched some street lamps then, the auditorium, his Phys Ed teacher, Mr. LoBianco's head, because the wart was on the nostril's flange and seemed improbable. Some chairs at home. The stoop. Soon after he took his sketch pad with him everywhere, his sharpened Mongol 2. A bit of carbon wrapped in toilet paper in his pocket with the lint.

And if he had -- renounced the world at 21? Would life have changed? His life? Lumpy mattresses, the flagellation of the soul, all that was nothing, zip, for wasn't that an every day? He'd said how could he offer anything to God; himself, or even more impossible, his work, when he was fierce about his talent, genius, who knew what it was, puffed up with pride, and only passionate about his way of seeing, seeing, yes, with eyes at open, breathlessly aware, the blaze of sunset fires banking down, the moon's explosion on the water glass upon the sill.

Before him always Hopkins how he burned ice-cold, his chisel to the words, reshaping Dialog; and praised God's name. Could it have been creature matters, only that, his bestial qualities, the torment of the flesh, his cowardice, that made him turn away? Or was a competition raging here? With whom? The Man, the Maker? Mastery he struggled for?

He heaved over on his left side beneath the quilt and groaned again. The heat was tropical. Then why not rip the covers off, late May? Because already it was growing from him like an amaryllis bursting through the soil. Because it was the Two O'clock. Because his body never had been shared, his body with his sixty years of it, his servitude.

It wanted him. Demanded him. His breath came short and he could feel each crease, each fiber of the cloth, as he sprouted, grew against, aggrandized till he thought he'd grown a pole, waxed exquisite, pulsed and throbbed and felt the urging for his hands to touch it, grip it, animal, unspeakable, as though the nether world and all its gravity had drawn him like a file, heavy as he was, his hairy parts, the silken, meaty shaft, the building of suspenseful blood, the urgency, the need, and then the tremor, shock, the oh, the million sperm now dying, spewed upon the sheet the oh, it spasmed on, Priapus rutting at his roughened hands, the gism bathing them like dew, the oh, unbearable, although it slowed and quieted and stopped, his hands all gluey with himself, at rest, his creature still. Was it now satiated, gorged, his goatishness, and could he sleep?

*

How the dawn astonished him, throwing through Victorian lead border glass and bevels all the fractured purples, reds. He stood winded on the landing although he'd only walked ten slippered steps, bathrobe open, neighbors not about this early let them look, his hairy graying matted chest, his dangling thing, the empty six o'clockness of the street, the innocence of sky. His hands hung heavy, slabs of meat on hooks, his fingers sausages, but oh his heart exultant at the sparrow on the sill, the light, the light now crashing on the floor. Drunk on pink, his eye hinged on the green which shivered to an aqua as it hit the sash. His lungs filled to their bursting point, his heart pumped hard and leaden feet and all, a joy despite himself pervaded him and he continued his descent on screaking stairs, a walnut bannister, and used the bathroom on the second floor.

Why endless minutes peering at his stool as if evincing auguries, fingering his cheekbones, tugging at the corners of his eyes? His body was contaminant - then why the fixity, intensity, the searching probe, the magnifying glass? Stiff fingers kneaded, pulled, left imprints on the slack skin underneath the jaw, the bags beneath the eyes. Exploded veins. Would it never let him be, this excrescence, lump of clay, this dross?

Eyes like one of Schiele's lost ones in the glass, the nose Picasso's granite slab. Puffy cheeks were those of some roué, hair receding now, made wild by night's encounter with the bedding, pillow-case.

Silence, silence in the house, crash of water on the porcelain, cascades from craggy heights. Hokusai's great waves of lather curled along his cheeks, arctic white against the earth of nose, black stubble peering through the swathe along the jawbone at the ear. There was a line, gone instantly as the razor plowed the snow away, a line that froze his hand, arrested him, blade poised, the drifts of soap, the warm of skin's arroyos. Enough distraction, body works, attention paid. The day awaited his beginning it.

*

The cherrywood's patina still glowed even though the stairs protested at his weight. How old were they, 120 years, stiff and groaning now? Up he'd crawled, mama right behind, to scoop him in her arms triumphant at the top, his earliest, this memory, the year before his father died and what remained? a moustache, truant lock of hair, a black apostrophe across the brow, twinkling yellow eyes. How had she managed then, the taxes, food, back then before this plague of affluence transformed to figure heads each citizen, black widows all, or widowers, with spider threads of gold. Painting as commodity. Monotypes as coin. His priceless watercolors bore a price. An orange sold for fifty cents. Imagine that.

The kitchen needed paint, a Hopper kitchen, wide and spare, the early morning light staring blank into the panes to illuminate linoleum worn down around the sink. He drank tomato juice.

In the sevenish he thrilled with the anticipation of spade-like fingers digging in the earth, down on his knees, pressed into loamy soil as though this was as much of Eden as he'd know, things growing, miracle enough. Cauliflower, cukes, romaine, were only vegetables as Guernica was only canvas loaded down with oils. This temple that he'd made. This recognition of élan vital.

Something - what? - seemed wrong as he let himself out the back door - exploding from his vegetables some little boys. How many? Galvanized, he ran, the boys all mercury, squirting over fence and gate, and one, a tiny one, trapped by barriers or height or mass and he, heart racing, panting, running, turning, then granite, stiffly blocking, the boy now cowering behind the broccoli.

He crouched beside him, heaving air. Now what, what, the little frightened face, sneakers unlaced, cheeks satin black, close-cut, kinky hair? The boy flinched at his heavy, reached-out hand but he rested it on the coarse clipped hair. This child. What was he, 8?

"What's your name?" he panted so hard he slurred the words, the damage minimal that he could see, some trodden soil, a broken carrot, top missing somewhere.

"Amika, mister," just above a whisper in the early light, brown-black eyes distrustful.

"Amika." They looked fully at each other. Saw. His breath slowed. "I like it." His voice seemed loud to him, the day just starting out. "Does it mean something?"

"My name, Amika? I don't know." He shifted, more confident. "You mad at me?"

Breathing normally again, his heart breathless only with the light on buildings, on the apple tree, on the small face, undertones of cobalt, umber, velvet grasses darkly breaking through. "Mad? At you?" He sat, the jeans just loose enough, dribbles, drops of paint, a Pollack denim. "No, Amika. Angry, no. I'm not mad at anything." He waved his strong, stiff fingers at the growing crop. "Don't hurt my vegetables. OK?" He stood and extended his right hand. "Up you go."

*

Bowl of milk outside for Katmandu. Garden weeded, tidied, raked. Sketch pad, pencils in the tote bag. Veggies, garlic, left-over lamb. The day was gold. It waited for the wonders of his unworthy hands, stiffly setting the latch. All in readiness. He left.

He walked as always with a rolling gait, a sailor home on leave although he'd never been one, a fighter long since quit the ring. Bulked up with open mackinaw he seemed a listing freighter as he proceeded toward the subway entrance a thousand yards away. The black beret -- an affectation he permitted to himself, a vanity. Few enough.

Once on the train no one cared or stopped what they were doing, talking, reading the News, hanging on the bar, braced against the door. Just another crazy -- drawing, not a threat. Eye contact only by a fluke. Line and mass, no more, a scribbled note sometimes suggesting color, underpaint, warm-up exercise this hour trip from Queens, part, part of the work.

It felt good, being in the building first. Dead silence. He walked the three flights to his studio, always walked. An hour and a half once stuck between the floors, the ancient elevator with its rattly gate, the little jerk before the gear took hold, the whine. When he had had the studio on eleven, then, oh with the skylight like an opening on Heaven, then he'd used the elevator, riding lordly to the top. The wonders that the skylight brought to him. Now the bastards wanted what -- twenty something grand a year, just rent, not buying anything. As it was what did he pay -- $921.17 a month for less than half the space he'd had, no skylight, lucky to have two windows and be right across the hall from the john and the landlord looked the other way at the tiny two-burner range to perk some coffee, make his veggie stew, with oh so rarely, bits of meat. What landlord? -- managers, all corporations now, computers how much money they could gouge.

His hand trailed the bannister, mahogany, his footsteps hollow on the marble stairs, the staircase maybe six feet wide. The way they used to build them then.

Neat. You had to keep things neat. Compact, with just the miserly space they let you have for all the money they wrung out of you. His case, they swore a captain used to keep his maps in it, flat out. He'd paid ten dollars maybe forty years ago in the junk shop long before they called everything antique and jacked the price up fifty times. It organized the etchings, but not all, never all. He'd be lost without it. Along the wall he'd built a rack, two-tiers, four decades worth of oils and watercolors, all his periods. Pastels, works in progress, tacked up on the walls, housed in wood cabinets, ancient thread chests.

He put the train sketches with the others in a special drawer and began to take the zucchini, carrots, peppers, garlic out of the paper bag but was caught by the way the light from his lousy two windows hit them. He framed them in his mind, made the composition happen, garlic there, and sketched them rapidly in his book. He tried a new arrangement and included the bag, the random crinkles, shadowed hollows. He put the sketches to the side, let them sit, breathe in the air, compose themselves.

He tuned to NPR. They were playing Mozart's Flute Concerto No. 1. Close to Heaven. Held down here below.

*

Despite the buildings blocking it, dodging overhangs and concrete racing to the sky, the sun threw swathes and bars of gold on couch and radio, along the northern wall to light some watercolors carrying on their dialog with him. The greenness of the thumbtacks holding them in place.

All afternoon, his fingers in a war against their stiffness, clumsiness, unwillingness to do his bidding, translate the thought. Something, there was something the bag was saying to him. What could he learn from it? Experimented: closed, upstanding, turned away, the veggies spilling from it like a cornucopia. None of it worked. The eggplant was a problem. Put it on the side. The scallions, no.

He went to take a piss and on the instant knew he moved inside a dream, knew and didn't know, anticipating freedom that was on its way, moving at a pace no longer his. He flushed.

He crossed the hall and opened up his door and OH the sun along the wall and OH he gasped the way it swept the table where he worked. He scooped up vegetables, moved them to the couch. Arranged the bag so that it yawned, laid on its side, awaiting goodies of the earth or emptied of them finally, the sun creating dark and bright and clarity, a blessed clarity was his and OH his breath came fast, heart pounding furious, his fingers now in his command.

Body that was chaos, body that was chains, had eyes to see the color, shape and form.

And now his pencil flew, his fingers nimble as the hills that skipped like rams, and from his shoulders all the weight sloughed off, so light, light-headed, he had to work with all his feverish intensity just to nail his body, nail it to the here and now before it floated off, and OH he saw it, saw the unimaginable beauty of the grocery bag, the blazing contrast of the ecru almost tan, the deepest burnt Sienna mixed with black although for now no time for color, sketched a dozen roughs in seconds flat, not even changing angle, no time for notes for miracles; revolutionizing line, imposing order on the world.

 

This story was published by Skylark, November 1999. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Pushcart XXIII, 1999.