Story-Portal

Patrick Roscoe

One night, when I am six years old, I fall asleep in my bed in the house where my mother and father also live, but wake up somewhere else. I am naked and hungry and cold. The room is bare and dark. There are no windows, and the light socket on the ceiling is without a bulb. The door is locked. I know, as I am certain my heart will beat again and then again, that my mother and father will not unlock the door, and will not bring me food and blankets, and will not comfort me. They do not know where I am, they cannot come to me, they do not wish to find me: the reason is not important. It doesn’t matter why I live in this room, and others equally dark and bare, for the next eight years.
My sense of time is imprecise, and marked only by the ticking of my heart. After waiting several days in darkness, I am old as the ancient man who has searched one thousand years for love. He has crawled across the world, and I between these four walls, to find the holy places where He might appear. Only the desperate are truly hopeful.
If you stood outside the door and listened through the keyhole, you would hear me say: sky is blue, grass is green, God is good. These are the old songs I croon, my arms wrapped around myself tightly, tightly. I wonder if anyone hears me. Listens but does not answer.
At the beginning I sometimes wish for a bed. On the cement floor I lie pressed against a wall, trying to warm the cold stone with the heat of my body. The stone soaks up my heat but offers none in return. I attempt to recall sensations of softness and warmth with such strength that there might appear beneath my head a pillow, against my skin a sheet of silk. The more frequently and vividly a vision is remembered, the sooner it fades, as though inside ourselves are stored, like money in banks, impressions which must be added to and not only drawn from. Or we become a vault as cold and empty as this room. Stone is hard and cold, I must repeatedly remind myself, while the darkness blurs all definition. What is soft, warm? I grope blindly around the room, until I realize there is only one such thing. I touch my bare skin.
My skin is porous, and as the chambers beneath it empty of old impressions of colour and light, darkness seeps inside to replace them. It fills me until, if you opened a flap of my skin like a window and peered inside, you would be unable to discern any difference between the outer and inner darkness. In this way my body, swallowed up by the lightless room, seems to float in a big black belly. I savour all feelings of pain and hunger and cold which suggest my continuing existence. I would be grateful for any touch upon my skin, no matter from what emotion it was born.
My ears learn to listen. I see sounds and hear shapes. Those that reach through my walls are never loud or clear enough to permit me to see a person, a car, a bird. They are indistinct as strangers’ faces in the night. By their quality, however, I sense that somewhere there is day as well as night. Periodically a needle is sunk into my arm and I fall into deeper darkness, wake in another room. Except that its temperature is slightly higher or lower, air staler or fresher, sounds more or less muffled, the new room
might be the old one. Then I discover countless minute differences between textures and flaws of this cement and that of my previous home. But the darkness is constant and may be relied upon. A thousand secret quirks in its character I alone know and cherish; like any true and loyal ally I will not reveal them, though you beat me. I will only say that sometimes I believe I have been taken to a room just beside the last one. At other times, sounds that come to me suggest I am now higher above the world or deeper inside it, nearer or further from the heart of a city. Yet there is never a line of golden light beneath the locked door, and without this crack of illumination I have no proof that the globe is not a black egg, twirling somewhere beyond the warmth of the sun, the light of the stars. The moves from one obscure void to another have no meaning or purpose I can discover, except to teach me: every room is dark and cold and bare.
Always the only article in the room is a bucket in which I expel my wastes. When it is not emptied for several weeks, the air I breathe smells so strongly of decay that it feels to me like a heavy substance, both liquid and solid, like a swamp, into which I sink. I spit on my skin and try to wash it clean with saliva. The bucket makes me more thankful for the darkness, which conceals the tireless journeys of roaches toward and from their pail of food. When I am most hungry, I view my excrement with appetite. I drool.
Every three or four or five days footsteps approach my door. The sound is purposeful and loud, suggesting its source is a large body and firm mind. Sometimes the steps pass my door, fading into silence. Maybe they stop just outside, and if my heart were not beating so loudly I might hear through the inch of iron the sound of another’s breathing. A body listens,
then walks away in the direction from which it came. Or perhaps a key grates in the lock. What I call food is thrown inside my room; anyway, I eat it. Soon I begin to wonder about the hand that throws the food, then I become curious about the heart that throws the hand. My need to know consumes me, and on the first occasion that the mass of flesh and bones and blood enters my room, I welcome it as explorers greeted their original sight of a new world. I feel warmth and weight strike me strongly, and treasure the discovery. Like the wheel and gravity, the act of love has always existed, though upon finding it for ourselves we insist it is our invention alone.
As his footsteps draw near, my heart pounds more and more loudly, and in their rhythm. A thin, mechanical cry, like that of a baby bird in a nest, swells through my throat. I do not know if I will be beaten or fed, and my emotion is an equal measure of fear of hurt and hope for comfort. Slowly this feeling becomes one inseparable thing, and I find pleasure in pain. I take satisfaction from the blows of his fists and feet against the surface of my skin, and this feeling enters me more deeply when he fills my body’s openings. His generosity touches me. Sometimes he feeds me after it is over, sometimes not. Eventually food becomes as unimportant as light and warmth; when my belly grumbles, it is calling hungrily for his hands, and the only taste I savour is the salty richness of my blood. If I were not hungry, he would not feed me, I realize. If I were not cold, his body would not warm me; if there were light, he would not illuminate the darkness. His visits are unpredictable and always expected. Over the years, I notice, they occur with gradually increasing frequency and possess a more intense, powerful character. I wonder where they will
lead. Feel him push further into me, like a brave explorer daring to enter more deeply the dark labyrinth from which he might not emerge alive.
He has never spoken to me, nor have I heard him moan, grunt, cry. I do not know his face except as darkness made solid. If I were free and walking down the street, I would not recognize him though he bumped into me and apologized at length. I would look into every face that passed and wonder if it were his. Strangers would glance quickly away from the small boy with staring, starving eyes. I would believe every face his face.
Alone. Waiting for his next visit, I try to imagine him. I consider whether his face is lined or smooth. Is his hair dark or light or turning grey? By his strength, I know he is not old. But I picture his eyes as old, and sad. I conjure his presence until he becomes as clear to me as someone I have once known, but forgotten.
Does he miss me when he goes away? Ache for me as I ache for him? I see him walking from this room, straightening his tie, smoothing his hair, with his handkerchief wiping away a spot of my blood that trembles like a tear upon his wrist. He drives home, stopping at a supermarket to buy the loaf of bread his wife has asked him to pick up on the way. His blue car pulls into a driveway before a pretty house. A small boy is sitting on the front steps. He looks hungrily at his father, who tosses three pennies to his son as he passes into the house. The husband kisses the wife. The family eats supper. Afterwards, the man sits in the living-room with a newspaper held before his face, like a shield. The woman gazes at the man, but sees only headlines that scream war, murder, accident. As she turns to him in bed, he moves away. I should check on Rickie, he says. He stands above the bed in
which the small boy lies with closed eyes though awake. The father’s fists are hidden in his pockets. He looks down upon his son’s face, which is smooth and white as a fresh, unmarked piece of paper. The father does not touch his son, the boy’s eyes do not open. When he sleeps at last, the boy sees things that make him wish he dreamed pure darkness.
He has been beaten and kicked until filled with pain completely, I know. My body feels his desperate attempts to free himself from this old and lasting hurt. There is anger and sadness when such release does not occur, and steadily growing violence in his efforts to achieve it. I feel inadequate when he leaves me, as troubled as he was before. I would like to kiss away every tear in his eyes, stroke his back with tenderness. I believe I can save him. But I find myself protecting my eyes and kidneys and other vulnerable places from his blows; however much I want to, I cannot give myself up to him completely. He tries to smash through my skin so he can curl his whole body inside my dark empty room, and float there like a fetus that knows only warmth and comfort. The words of love I wish to utter emerge from my mouth as a very high loud squeal, which resembles the noise made by a pig being slaughtered and which continues until he forces my head into the pail of waste or fills my mouth with some part of himself. When he is gone, the cuts and bruises left upon my body burn with warmth and I feel, in the cold darkness, a hot bright fire near to me. My skin throbs and aches, remembering my lover. I feel his touch still upon me and I am not alone. The emptiness of his absence, my room, is filled. Yes, I wait for him with longing and pray that when he returns I can heal him at last.
Three times an angel has appeared to me — or that
is what I call her, since she resembles my memory of that ornament that stood on top of the Christmas tree in the pretty house. She floats down from the darkness above me and illuminates my room with her presence. My eyes are not used to such light. It dazzles, blinds. She wraps me in her wings, which are warm and soft as all feathers. Milk and honey are what she feeds me during long, sweet kisses. She kisses the sores on my body and they are healed. She bathes me in scented water and rubs my skin with fragrant oils, murmuring soft sounds which might mean: one day the darkness will turn to light; or, the darkness is not so bad; or, the darkness is for the best. Then, with a wave of her wand, she is gone. I hate her. Not because she doesn’t carry me away on her strong wings; I do not wish to leave my room, and would not go with her if she begged. But I have been familiar with pain and cold and dark hunger. They were my good friends, and the brief visitations of my angel only turn them into bitter enemies whom I must fight until I am conquered. When I am beaten, they are on my side again and tell me, warningly: we are constant companions, we are not fickle friends, it is less painful to lie always in darkness than sometimes in light. We will win every war.
The time of waiting can pass slowly. I repeat my prayers: bless him, save him, bring him back. Dragging hours are filled by recalling his last visit. Replay that act of love over and over until it becomes a film in my head I can start at the flick of a switch. Crouched against the wall, I watch the same scenes recur. There are certain favourite ones. Play them in slow motion, make the pleasure last and last. Touch my skin and feel the unique imprint of his hand. The tender bruises. Happy.
But in the darkness my touch is sometimes clumsy. I fumble with the switch and by accident start a film I do not wish to see and cannot halt. I see a boy of five years sitting on the front steps of a pretty house. He sits there because the sunlight is warm. He wears a pair of short blue pants and a white shirt with short sleeves. He wraps his arms around his bare knees and rests his head upon them. Through the open window behind him floats music. His mother is listening to the radio while she cooks supper. Tonight there will be macaroni, baked soft and warm. The cheddar cheese will be melted creamily throughout, the blood-red tomatoes sudden bombs of flavour, the top a crust of golden crumbs. The scent of cooking food and the sound of music are ribbons that twine around the boy. He narrows his eyes until sunlight enters them like a crack of golden light beneath the door of a dark room. He is waiting for his father to come home from work. Then they will eat. The blue car will turn the corner and approach slowly down the street. The boy will watch it steadily, because if he glances away even quickly the car will turn into another driveway and his father will go into another house, pausing to toss copper pennies to another boy, who will bury them like pirate treasure.
After the wrong film plays and the strong images fill me, I cannot feel my lover. There is no dark space inside me for him to enter. I see him brutally loving another boy, who is smaller than me. Who cries and cries. He still sobs after my lover leaves the room. Shut up. I tell him, because the sound irritates me and because I am jealous. The boy weeps until he melts into a pool of tears. I lap up the salty puddle greedily, and he is gone.
A month later I can feel my lover’s touch again. His
gentle, tender caresses. Afterwards I am surprised to find my skin sore, my heart bleeding. Two words twist and coil and wrap around each other in my mind. Love hurts.
My ears become more sensitive to sound the longer they are surrounded by immediate silence. I come to believe the muffled sounds that pass through my walls are cries of other boys who also await a consoling lover. They weep when he is with them and when he is not there. Every cry uttered through time and space is the echo of one voice, I think. Listen to my voice escape from a boy who walks the tightrope of the equator and from one who leans his back against the Great Wall of China. From one who treads on air, above the new moon. Their cries bounce between my four walls, echo in the hollow space inside me. Or is this sound the beating of my heart?
I hear the turning key. Although it scrapes in the lock, the door does not open. Footsteps move away, leaving silence behind. He has not come to me in a week, my skin holds no stinging memory of his touch. I need to feel him upon me, against me, inside me. My fists hammer on the door and my voice calls out. I turn the doorhandle. It opens. After one thousand failed attempts to open my door, I believed it useless to touch it again. At once I know that since the moment I ceased trying, years ago, the door has been unlocked. The sound of a turning key has been, always, the protest of my rusted heart upon his entrance.
I am afraid to leave my room because it is my only home, and for a moment fear that I will lose it forever holds me there. But I must find him. Suddenly, I doubt he will come to me again, for I have failed to swallow all his darkness, so he is going to another bare
room where another boy waits hungrily. I leave, walking down a long, dimly lit hallway. On both sides of me are closed doors like the one I have just opened. They are scratched and marked, but without numbers. Through them comes the sound of crying boys. As my footsteps approach, the cries stop; and I sense breath held, pulses racing in hope. When I pass by, the cries begin again, in a higher key. I could open any of these doors, fall upon a waiting boy, soothe him with my loving blows. But I need such comfort myself and walk on in search of it. The empty hallway bends. I turn a corner, then reach a flight of stairs leading down. I descend them to a door below, open it, and find myself on a street at dawn. Night is leaving the world, a red planet is rising in the sky, I am falling into darkness.
Warm. Soft. White. I presume I am lying in the arms of my angel, then see I am in a bed in a white room. The sheets are also very white, and so are the bandages that cover various parts of my body. A tube runs from a glass tank filled with clouded liquid and into a vein in my left arm. My lungs cannot breathe this thin, odourless air and my eyes cannot bear this bright light. My skin cannot breathe beneath these bandages, blankets, sheets. The pillow and bed beneath me are not solid or hard enough, I am sinking into softness. Drowning, suffocating. I gasp and struggle until hands appear to hold me down. They are not his hands. They belong to bodies clothed in white, to faces bearing expressions I do not remember how to read. Do they convey love? Hate? Sounds issuing from their mouths speak a language foreign to me. A needle sinks into my right arm, and I am filled with joy because I will wake in another dark room, and my lover will come to me there. Before falling into
blackness, I see the sky outside the window. It is white. The air that enters the open window stings my eyes and hurts my throat with its freshness. It flutters the white curtain, like an angel’s wing.
I waken to the same white room, the same bright light. Disappointment. The light drains the darkness from me, illuminating the empty space beneath my skin, leaving me weak and weary and sad. I lie very still and silent, becoming familiar with the routine around me. I wait, but only women in white visit me. When they touch my forehead or wrists, their hands are as light as fingers of air. The tube is taken from my left arm, my right arm is injected less often. My hair is cut and I am bathed. Later the bandages are removed. I watch mouths open and close, sometimes suspecting the noise they make is meant for me. It has no meaning. I strain to summon sensations precious to me — cold, darkness, hunger — but the bodies that bend over me refuse to let me live in my former state of grace. They are enemies who plot to kill me with attention. No matter how tightly I close my eyes, some light seeps inside their lids. Even at night scattered lights glow around me. Wounds on the skin of darkness.
A man comes once each day. By my bed he sits and moves his mouth. I wait for fists to strike my body, which aches more painfully as each sore heals, each bruise vanishes. When the man does not touch me and when I remain silent, we are both disappointed. I wonder what wrong I am doing that he does not lovingly hurt me. I struggle to speak. Lay me on the hard floor and love me with all your strength, I will say when my clumsy tongue learns to move again. I make sounds and the man’s head nods. The first word
I correctly form is not the one I expected to say. Darkness, I beg.
They ask my name and age and place of birth. They desire to know what happened before I was found on the street. Who did this to you? What was done to you? Where? How long? I can only say that once there was a dark room and a man. Before that? I describe the boy who sat on the steps of the pretty house. Was that you? I hesitate. Then I mention my angel. I say that one day she will come to me again. Lift me on to her strong wings. Carry me back to the dark room. Save me.
They move me to another room, also white. Sometimes I am supposed to lie on the bed, sometimes I am supposed to sit in the chair, sometimes I am supposed to walk around a larger room where other people, dressed in the same white robes I wear, also walk. Eat this. Then go to sleep. Now wake up. I am obedient. I speak and they make dark lines upon white paper. They look at each other and exchange single words: shock, damage, trauma, amnesia. The more darkness they put upon the paper, the happier they are. I learn to please them; it is so easy to know what they want. Keep my eyes open and blink the lids. Look at people when they speak to me. Pull the corners of my mouth upwards. Don’t mention my angel or my lover in the darkness. I please them, but they offer me no reward in return. No love.
One day I ask for a pair of blue shorts and a shirt with short white sleeves. They smile, giving me a pair of long blue pants. It’s winter, they say, seeing my disappointment at the length of the cloth. I would like to live with my mother and father in the pretty house, I say. First they say that my mother and father can’t be found. Then they say that my mother and father
are eagerly waiting for me to return to the pretty house. Now they exchange different words: hope, cure, miracle. They show me pictures of things I have not seen before, and teach me the names for them. One day I will learn to swim, to dance, to ride a bicycle, they promise. I will walk beside the sea and the sun will turn my skin brown. I will drive a blue car to the pretty house where my wife and children live. My name is Richard and I am fourteen years old and I am as good as new. By the window I sit in the chair and close my eyes. Heels click, click on the hard shiny floor. Grow louder, fade away. They never sound like his. A hand floats on my shoulder, a voice wavers into my ear. It’s good to cry, it says. One day you’ll forget, it promises.
The car isn’t blue. The man and woman are not my father and mother. This pretty house is not the one I remember. I sense that these people are troubled because I pay them and their rooms little attention. Feel them watch me carefully, nervously. This is your room, they say. I close the curtains, shut the door, lie on the floor against the wall. A knock. When I do not answer, the door opens. The woman’s hand is so light upon my head I cannot feel it. The man doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t love me.
The woman always wants me to leave my room and go out to play. You can go to the park or you can go to the river. You’re free. The winter sun is cold, white. My eyes always hurt, I strain them looking for blue cars. The loud noises and sharp air and vivid world around me hurt, and I long for my lover’s touch to hurl me into darkness. I am forgetting what I yearn to remember. I become dull with heavy food my stomach is not used to, it makes me hungry for sharp
hunger. Have another helping, says the smiling woman.
I must go to school. In a small room I sit alone with a woman who says I can sit in a big, crowded room when I catch up. She teaches me this and that, sometimes I learn to please her. Then it’s time for me to walk in the crowded hallways because a bell has rung. So many people. Several come up to me. You’re Richard, they say; I wonder who told them my name. I answer their questions, I look into their eyes, I blink the lids of mine. They shrug, turn away. Their running shoes make no sound, they could be ghosts. Or maybe there is a squeak of rubber against tile. I think of mice scurrying in the dark, hunting roaches whose bodies they crunch with sharp, white teeth.
There is one boy who wears jeans of pale blue and a shirt with short white sleeves. I see his hungry eyes. Some other boys come by, his face changes. He smiles like them. They all pass down the bright hallway, marching in step to some beat I cannot hear. The boy’s name is John, I learn.
The lockers I like. Everyone has their own, and they can be opened only by secret combinations. I watch them spinning the black wheels, hunting for certain private numbers. Then there’s a click. A metal door opens, revealing a small dark space. Girls have posters of rock stars taped to the insides of their lockers. They take out small mirrors and pout at their reflections, puffing their lips and kissing red lipstick on them. Girls’ lockers are as neat as dollhouses, but boys throw their books into a jumble of baseball gloves and running shoes and old lunches. After banging their lockers closed with dramatic gestures, boys always kick the door, making one more small dent.
My locker is number 267. I won’t say the combination. I carry my books around with me or leave them in the small classroom. The inside of my locker is bare, except for the small figure of a toy soldier I found in the park. Someone lost him or threw him away. While the teacher draws white lines on the black board, I see the soldier waiting in the small dark room. He listens for my footsteps, but when only those of others pass he doesn’t cry. It’s all right to cry, the woman says to me. I am sitting on the front steps of the pretty house. My arms are wrapped around my legs, my head is resting on my knees. Watching cars pass up and down the street.
My angel will never come for me, I know. She thinks I do not need her any more, because I am in light. Sometimes she flies with white clouds through the sky, her long robes flapping. She sees me walking below and waves her wand in greeting. The clouds break, scatter, dissolve. My angel has gone to a boy who waits dark days in a bare room. My fickle friend.
My skin is white, smooth, unmarked. A good healer, the doctor says. There was never any lover, my blank skin mocks. I dig the point of the knife into a secret place on my body. Watch the blood rise to the surface of the flesh. It feels warm and tastes salty. I write a scarlet word on my arm. Love. Lick it up, swallow it away. The small wound burns like fire, but one that dies down too quickly. Too soon it becomes a pale warmth, equal in strength to the spring sun. Summer will come soon, the woman says. Then the sun will be hot. Then it will burn me and then he will brand me.
I say some boys and girls have invited me to the park down by the river that evening. We are going to roast marshmallows and hot dogs over a fire, then drink Cokes with them. Later, when the fire has
burned into hot, glowing coals, we will sing songs around it.
The man and woman are pleased. They smile and ask if I have enough money. I dress in blue jeans, white T-shirt, sneakers. I walk past the empty park by the river, through the streets lined with pretty houses and into the city. Many cars pass up and down the big, wide streets. On a corner I stand and watch for blue cars containing only one man. Count cars until I pass number 267. When the fire inside me has burned into hot glowing coals and my blood is singing, a blue car pulls up to the curb. The driver reaches over and opens the door for me. I get inside. As we move down the street, I stare straight ahead, not wanting to see his face. His sad, old eyes. He wants to know my name and age and place of birth. Out of the corner of my eye I see him glancing at me. He is trying to discover if I resemble a boy who sat on the front steps of a house, waiting. A boy who was himself.
Turn off the light, I say. Then the room is dark. He pulls me toward the bed. The floor, I say. He strokes my arm. Soft, he says. His touch is light as air, with my angel’s wings I am falling through miles of empty sky. Hit me, I say. Feel him freeze. Feel myself fall upon the ground with a force that jars me, breaks me. Don’t speak, I say. Harder, I say. More, I say.
It is very late when I return to the pretty house. The lights are on because the man and woman are waiting up for me. I tripped and fell on to cement, I answer their questioning looks at my bruised arms and face. The man says he drove past the park, but saw no fire or anyone singing around it. It was too cold, so we listened to records in John’s basement, I say. In my room and behind my closed door, I lie on the floor
against the wall. Darkness. Muffled sounds come through the wall. For a long time the man and woman murmur words I cannot hear. I feel my sore body. The tingling touch of love is with me through the night. Alive again.
I bury the money the men give me in the sand down by the river. Beneath a black ring of charred wood, ash.
At school the teacher no longer speaks so often of the day when I’ll catch up. I no longer try to please her, or the man and woman. Save myself for the ones who offer right rewards. One morning I see that John has left his locker open. Quickly, I take the toy soldier from my locker and put it into his. That afternoon I see a crowd of boys and girls gathered in front of John’s open locker. They fall silent as I walk past. John lives in a house on Jasmine Street, five blocks from the house where I stay. I walk by it on my way into the city, but John is never sitting on the front steps.
I search for him once or twice a week, when I feel the mark of the last hand leave me. Now the man and woman do not ask me where I am going at night. They look at each other when I leave the house in T-shirt and jeans. In the city I discover certain corners where cars will more likely stop for me. I learn that if I do not ask for at least fifty dollars, the men are disappointed and do not take me to their dark rooms, I tell them this or that story; it’s so easy to know what they need to hear. My name is John, I say. No, that’s my name, they laugh. I might go into a red or black car, if no blue ones stop for me and if my need is strong. Maybe there are two men in the car, instead of one. Sometimes I meet men whose love is not strong and who do not want to love me hard. Their eyes
become puzzled or frightened, they hand me some money and ask me to leave. Others like to use their hands heavily and those ones seek me at the corner again. No thank you, I say when they find me a second time. I do not want to learn their faces well, and a single time is all it takes to teach me they are not him. None of them love me strongly enough. I am searching for the only man who can.
One night a car stops. I get inside, look straight ahead as usual. Richard, he says. I turn and see the man who lives in the pretty house. What are you doing? he asks. I was too tired to walk back home, so I was waiting for a ride, I say. He drives in silence. His hands grip the steering wheel tightly, his face is hard and angry. For the first time I think he might be able to love me. At the house the man and woman say they want me to stay home and not go out alone after dark. That night I lie in my dark room and wait for the man to come to me. I have not been loved in a week, my skin holds no tender memory of a touch. The man does not open my door. In the morning I walk towards school, past it, and into the city. The man and woman will not look for me, I know.
I live in a hotel. The hallways are dim, because one of the other prostitutes or drug addicts always steals the light bulb. I walk down the dark hall, passing closed doors on either side of me. They are scratched and marked, but without numbers. I hear the crying boys behind the doors fall silent at the approach of my step. How they hold their breath, then sigh in disappointment when I do not turn a key in their locks. My own room contains a bed, a chair, a small table, a sink. I lie on the floor, listening to roaches scurry into and out of the corners. The curtains are always closed, and I have taped thick black paper over the glass. I am
visited daily, and sometimes my door is opened as many as five times in one night. My skin is never empty of traces of love. I glow with warmth. Tomorrow or the next day my only true love will come to me. One or another of the men will be him. I will not need to see his face, because my skin’s perfect memory will recognize him at once. He will love me hard and finally, so I will never crave his touch again. In pure darkness I lie and await the approach of his footsteps down the hall. They will march to the rhythm of my hopeful heart.

1990