And the Kid is knocked to the ground, dead. Pain dazzles his heaving chest, a blade purring beneath soft skin. Red and blue under his eyes, hot, then black. The concrete wobbles and chimes, relentless rubber from beyond slamming him home. Home? No, this can’t be home. The Kid can’t die yet.
They don’t dig graves on the Williamsburg Bridge. 11:35 pm, thirteen hundred miles from home, and one hundred and fourteen dollars to his name (twenty-four in his pocket), the Kid isn’t oozing riches but he is dripping blood. Thick warm midnight blood, right out of his nostril, weaving a tidy lightning bolt down his shirt. If he would only flicker his eyes open a little wider, he could be doused with Satan’s cerulean—a night sky—and watch the city’s billion electric eyes swoon silently until dawn shuts them tight. The crystalline ropes of the bridges can tie a knot around his heart, freeze his tongue, and bleed a lunar pallor over his trembling skin. What a vista he could’ve drank if only the thugs hadn’t wandered out behind him.
He stands before the three-headed maelstrom. They don’t seem much older than him, only more desperate. One of them, a fat raincoat flapping around a gaunt husk, has the face of a twisted fender. Before his happy fist goes in for more blood the Kid almost feels sorry for him. Compassion and torment are funny things. The Kid didn’t know (until he reached the city) that these emotions could concurrently swirl inside of him. Shadows form another fist and dig away the sentiment. On the ground again, nose mere feet away from the grating separating man from automobile, the Kid whimpers back into the past. Three months, four months, four years, back until the day he screamed to a teardrop sun that he would be a poet. He could’ve sworn the earth shuddered.
A concrete voice slurs over his eardrum: “get the fuck up and give us your money, now.”
“No,” the Kid whispers.
“What was that?”
“I don’t have time to deal with you guys. Get away from me.”
“Oh, smartass huh? Vin bust him nice, will ya.”
The Kid is up again, this time with pudgy fists guarding his temples. No matter how little he eats, how little he sleeps, and how dreamless the nights become, his hands never shed their cherubic fuzz. He thought that his ferocious beating of Tyke Crepiscular in the 8th grade was enough to raze his innocence forever. Yet when his blood-flecked hands finally dried, the fuzz remained. They’d come in a fever for his little fingers and he’d kick the assholes away. The Kid knows nothing is more important than his hands. Without them, writing wouldn’t happen. He’s not the dictating type.
The instant before the next punch sears his eye socket reminds him of the same moment of flux, of chaos, before the idea becomes the word. As he discovered in his 17th (and current) year, the essence of a poem is an unknowable swell on the edge of vision—inner vision, not your fucking eyes (as the Kid likes to yell)—that finally breaks upon the shore, foaming vowels and consonants that never quite look the way you dreamed them in the swell, back when there were no words. Sometimes he feels like he’s trying to pour the ocean into a thimble. It has been the Kid’s mission to transcribe what he perceives as the true essence of existence. It goes beyond reflecting life, he’ll mutter angrily. I want to reach back to the primordial spark that made us so audacious and so cruel and so disfigured and so perfect and scald the 8 x 11 white paper with this, whatever you wish to call it. It has no true name. Maybe the atavist. I will direct flame once untamable to the center of creation and show everyone how it burns. That is what I will do and I will not die before this is done. Not before I cross the Williamsburg Bridge to see him.
The man named Vin shoves the Kid in the ribs and he reels to other guardrail, the one saving man from drowning in the East River. A red demon claws at his innards, sinking new despair into his gut. Loneliness buoys the despair, granting it a tide to raft on, a path to follow. The Kid has no friends. The Kid has no family. A mother and father, yes, but not a family in the spiritual sense he believes in. Until tonight, no one wanted to touch him. He’s managed to navigate the city’s vast cobweb without sticking anywhere. Well, at least the vermin got him.
Each knuckle on Vin’s next fist, like Zeno’s arrow, has its own moment. Each one splitting the ether apart before it splits the Kid’s lip. Memory smashes him open, mimicking the arm’s frantic breath, dripping images of the last year down his spine, bleeding him the groves of hope he cultivated on trains, on buses, on feet, the shudder of a wish to see the Poet, an underworld sage dangling the cosmic, the primordial, and every drop in between, the one who promised to show the Kid exactly what he wants. Promised in the old-fashioned way, via letter.
“You’re an infant Shakespeare,” the Poet said. “You need to come to New York.” The Kid couldn’t believe he had answered his letter. A Midwestern boy whose only anchor to the world had been a stack of Whitman and a mutt named Clyde. A Midwestern boy who fumbled through sixteen and a half years of mediocrity not of his own making. He never believed he would escape the malaise of his town, the dead-eyed post office, the wan awnings, and the square, that infernal patch grass where the balloons flew on the fourth of July and the faces, boiling unimaginable ignorance, cackled in their own shit. The worst was the steeple. Sundays clanging against his cool dreams, mother’s hand on his cheek, wake up wake up, cereal like carbolic acid on his lips, radio clucking, minivan spinning him to church. The steeple was a herpetic sore on the sky, jagged white, festering with all that the Kid couldn’t take anymore, almost as revolting as the reverend’s voice. He can still hear if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, remove hence to yonder place and it shall remove and nothing shall be impossible to you through his skull, even as the jabs crush his ear and the tornados of flame rage across his face, enough to burn away the good but not the bad, especially the reverend’s voice.
“Now wasn’t that a good sermon, dear?” his mother asks.
“No.”
“You seem upset lately. I’m worried. I think we should take you to see the guidance counselor.”
“He couldn’t guide a fish to water, mom.”
“Well…”
“And neither could you.”
The Kid sits typing at his desk, sometimes scribbling, shooting manifestos and poems and blurbs and tracts and a little flaming bullshit everywhere, a boy more than possessed. His friends have long since left. “Let’s play Counterstrike, c’mon.” “No.” “C’mon.” “Go fuck yourself.” No has become his new catchphrase, a cathartic bullet he fires at all the waste he sees piling around him. “Fecal matter, all of it,” he whispers about the town, the same town that bakes him cookies and praises his science fair projects. The Kid frightens his teachers. One said—
“All right Vin, that’s enough. The little fucker’s about dead already. Get his cash and let’s get the hell out of here.”
Vin releases the Kid’s collar and spits. He’s surprised that the frail kid has held up so well. He can take a punch, all right. The man who told Vin to stop steps in front of the Kid, breathing vodka and Marlboros on his broken nose. One eye closed, another stuttering open, the Kid feeds on what little scraps of night he can. And here comes a J train, savagely slithering as a wrathful snake across the slate of dark the Kid must confront. He can only see bits of silver, rogue sparks, shy florescence, and maybe, just maybe, the eye of a girl. But probably not. The four of them all wait for the train to pass. Moments can’t hatch in the shadows of those subway cars.
“You ready to give up to your old pal Murray?”
Murray taps the Kid on the cheek. Twisted Fender Face still hasn’t spoken yet but Murray waves him over. The Kid gurgles his own blood. Salty and rich, it almost makes him smile. It reminds him of the ocean. “I’ll give you the ocean, Murray,” the Kid says.
Yellow fingers paw at his trouser pockets. He should let them have it. Let the thugs win their battle and get on with the war. Dead boys don’t meet poets in Williamsburg.
“You’ll end up dead with words like these.”
“What do you mean, Ms. Dosetti?”
“You write well but you, well, uh, all I can say is that it’s dangerous. You are dangerous. I’ve never seen anything else like it before.”
“You don’t like my use of blood?”
“To be honest, no, no I don’t.”
“But blood is of the earth, Ms. Dosetti.”
Blood is of the earth! And I am of the earth! The school bell rings and the Kid runs straight home to his dust-ridden room. He has an idea. One shot at escape, one way to join the future he can nearly see ahead of him. The Poet in New York. The anthology lies like a sleeping phoenix under his bed, smoldering and hidden, 291 pages of enough dynamite to restore literature back to life. The Poet had done what the Kid wants so desperately to do. He had taken the truth of the world and put it on the page. Put it on there again and again. Behind the order of his town the Kid saw the chaos, the well-dressed gentlepeople smiling all the way to the slaughterhouse. Some went there, some ran it. Ties strangling them like nooses and the air-conditioning casting the spell of asphyxiation. Microwaving dreams, bloating and distorting, a howl for all those beaten by a grotesque modernity. The Kid writes his letter. It goes something like this:
Dear Poet,
I am the Kid and I live somewhere in the middle of America. It doesn’t matter where…
The money doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t, and the Kid is ready to finally let the thugs have his hunk of bills. However, rolled up like a perfect flute between the money is a little slip of paper that the Kid can’t let go. On the slip is the Poet’s initials, P.V., scrawled in ink aphotic black. The script sweeps the page like a winter wind, whipping from crinkled edge to crinkled edge. Without the mark—special for the Kid, of course—the Poet won’t know it’s him. He never saw his face. Only his writings. The Kid’s words were enough to convince the Poet that he was worth meeting. They each saw a prophet in the other. Murray, Vin, and Twisted Fender Face barrel the Kid over with their own view. He’s meat carrying money, meat that needs to be quieted, and quickly. Cops might be on the way.
“Gimme the money back. There’s a piece of paper inside. I need it, god damn it. Give it back.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Elbows blast his stomach like dagger teeth, opening new mouths of pain in his flesh. The Kid is on his knees, one hand clinging to the roll of bills, the other bracing for a collapse. One last tug and the money is gone, along with P.V. It all slips out from his fingers like a sick sparrow. The only thing left is a gum leaking fresh and fresher blood, a red ocean inside ready to burst. He remembers his words for Murray.
The Kid leaps up and sinks his unclipped nails into Murray’s windbreaker. For the Kid, the world is a violent watercolor, a shapeless void of scarlet night and dribbling action. It gets faster and slower. Fingers burning white on the reddish windbreaker, the Kid can see how the mystics could step out of time. If he pushes a little harder and thinks a little faster, he can escape the thugs and walk into tomorrow.
Murray cracks him in the jaw. The Kid can’t go anywhere. Cords snap underneath, tethers to simpler times that were never so simple, his illusion of innocence long gone but the hammer to the skull reminding him why martyrs are martyrs and why we don’t eat ice cream instead of reloading the howitzers. Truths he has always known, truths that were revealed to him in Central Park when the cops took him in for sleeping on the rock, truths that were revealed to him when the teachers debated whether to suspend or expel, truths that were revealed to him when his mother sobbed quietly in bed when he told her everything she ever stood for was a virulent lie. Truths that he knew dearly when he wrote the letter.
…I’m writing to you because I think you can help me. I’ve read all of your poetry and all of your anthologies and all I can say is that they’ve changed the course of my life. They’ve more than opened my eyes. They’ve ripped open my soul and held it to a light no one else can see or feel. At first it burned. But then, as I came to understand you, I saw the ruse humanity has been playing on me and everyone else. Every institution, from the supposedly noble to the supposedly evil, is a cruel deception. They built this world of steel to trap us, to suppress our potential for true greatness, for true transcendence. Most literature and wisdom is the stuff of maggots. I still remember when my principal told me I needed to work harder. I asked him simply, why?
The Kid staggers at Murray. Vin looks at him like he’s a scarecrow come to life. They’re both grinning but there is a contorted fear behind their teeth. The Kid, unlike the other victims, won’t stay down. And the cops really might be on the way. Vin wants to run, and run fast. He tugs on Murray’s sleeve but Murray, an ex-Golden Gloves scrapper still longing for titles he can’t win, won’t let the Kid off easy. He needs to go down and stay down, otherwise Murray knows he hasn’t truly won. This is what life has become to him: a series of short, brutal victories punctuated with virtual somnolence. He could be wide awake yet in truth he is sleeping, snoozing until the next victim stumbles along. Nothing like a fresh score to wake him up. Nothing like knowing he could have his next meal without killing himself as a bus driver or longshoreman or delivery boy. Murray is awake and no cop is keeping him from ending the Kid. It is all Murray has left.
Fingers collapse on the Kid’s neck, pipes snaking through the skin, rusting sin on his sweat, the world is choking…
He told me a lot of things, things I won’t bother writing here because you’ve probably heard them. But everything he said led back to one thing and one thing only: freedom. They talk and talk about freedom but they only lock us tighter. I feel the shackles right now as I write in my room. They want me to work harder to take up a job so I can manufacture an existence they can exploit further. Keep the machines on full blast, machines for war and everything else. They think they can soften me with candy and electricity and tell me how I should find fulfillment. That fucker Franklin, if he hadn’t written that autobiography…I slog through stultifying bullshit, a civilization built on nothing but absurd carnage. They want artists dead, I’m convinced. I’m done with creeds, with parties, with nations, and with their ideas. As you said in “Dulcify,” “Let their corruption rot and return to the earth.” I want to move beyond this simple humanity. I won’t work in their fields with their plows until I die. Show me how to be a poet. Show me how to be inhuman. I attached my writings on the next page. Please read them. I fear that they’ll ruin me soon. Mother is calling for dinner. They want to feed me. Nourishment for their plow, not for my spirit. Never for my sprit. Please respond as soon as you can. Sincerely…
The words drop in and out of him. Breath an illusion, night a blade on his teeth, the blood deeper, fuller, a star away hell’s white on the black, it flickers with a tear, two tears, two thousand, rolling, another in the gut, and another, the Kid’s face is up and swimming in terror, in rage, the final caldera collapsing before the explosion.
The Kid fulfills his promise. He gives Murray the ocean. Out of his mouth it flows, from the gums of the earth, from the hot springs inside and below him. The Kid’s blood shines on Murray’s face like a mask of his own dream fog. When the Kid squints at him he thinks Murray could pass for jubilant or malignant. Murray’s eyes whirr under the blood, strained like a mad carnival. They’re bright with the embers of a smoldering psyche. So bright that the body doesn’t catch the Kid ripping the slip of paper out of Murray’s hand. No time for the cash. The Kid gets his legs back and takes off.
They beat after him even though they already have his money. Not the slip of paper, though…the Kid has it crushed in his fist. He’s surprised that he can run so well. The hunger, the blood, and the misery should all be chains binding him to the pavement. This bridge should be trying to strangle him. Instead he dashes downhill, the city lights dying behind like old flies, the river silently goading him on. Another train clanks by but the broken vision and the dull euphoria hushes it all. Murray and his maelstrom are closing in.
When they finally clutch him he has Brooklyn in sight. He can’t help but laugh. So close to his destiny but here they are, the pollutants of the earth, holding him back. They don’t even want his money anymore. They want his dignity. His spirit. Who the fuck spits in someone else’s face? Murray wants to know. He’s always thought of himself as a rebel, a man on the fringe who could flip the bird at just about anyone or anything. This little fucker, a son of a bitch I’ve knocked into the ground a million god damn times, just spat all his blood in my face. He must know Murray is going to kill him. Maybe that’s why the Kid’s laughing.
The Kid bellows. A sun erupts inside of him and the thugs can see this even as they pound his life away. Those liquid green eyes, now barely slits, continue to watch them like medallions from hell. They realize that ending the Kid won’t end their own suffering. He’ll be gone, off to god knows where, all the while gripping that ratty piece of paper that seems to mean more to him than all the women they’ve screwed and all the cash they’ve cradled. He’ll be free. Murray’s sneaker smashes through the Kid’s face. Vin’s belting the spine. Twisted Fender Face’s fists roar in all their ugliness into The Kid’s solar plexus. They watch him writhe in the shadow of Brooklyn.
And they see the light pouring out of him. Laughing. The more they kick, the louder he grows. He’s laughing his blood onto their shoes and the world. They all quake. Murray looks up at the bridge and down at the city’s crazed emerald and starts to see why the Kid is laughing. Almost.
They hit him until he finally stops rattling with laughter. They can’t have any more noise. If another J or M train sped by it would probably kill them. Murray crouches down low enough to put his ear to the Kid’s lips. Nothing seeps from there. For the first time in a decade, maybe longer, Murray realizes how alone he is. Maybe if the Kid hadn’t laughed things would’ve been different.
Vin tries to pull the piece of paper from his cold hands. Murray shoves him aside and grabs the Kid’s wrist. It feels oddly heavy. He sees the tip of the paper and pinches at it, pulling as hard as he can without actually touching the fingers. He can’t bring himself to touch something dead. In a moment the wind is slashing at him and he lets go. No, he can’t get the paper out. Let the cops find it.
“Turn silences and nights into words. Make the whirling world stand still,” the Kid recites to the feet clapping away from him. Then he returns to the verdure.
***
Ross Barkan
Ross Barkan is currently a student at the Stony Brook University and hails from Brooklyn, New York. His favorite writers include Ken Kesey, Henry Miller, and David Foster Wallace. When not punching away maniacally at another novel, he can be found yelling at his favorite baseball team, the New York Yankees. After realizing he could never be the Yankees’ starting first baseman, he decided he wanted to be the vanguard writer of the 21st century. Hey, a boy can dream.
