The Way It Is:

A Day Of Small Disasters

By N.E. Silber

He wasn’t looking at me. I couldn’t understand it. I gave up talking to him, because I knew he wasn’t listening. But he wasn’t only blocking out me, he was blocking out the world. On the east end of the park, a horse had come loose from one of those quaint romantic carriages and was running amuck along the cobbled path, sending people screeching away from it; on the opposite end of the park, a blue Mini-Cooper had taken on a black Escalade in combat and had crashed headlong into it’s side in mid-street, holding up traffic for blocks, so that the finalized cacophony was intensely obnoxious if not absolutely maddening. Despite where we stood in the very middle of the chaos, he didn’t seem to hear it, he didn’t seem to be aware of what was going on around us. He barely if at all seemed to be aware of me. “Polanski?” I asked him, more in the way that someone would ask another person for someone who wasn’t present at the moment, or someone one wished to know the whereabouts of. The typical response would be something to the effect of “in the bathroom”, or “he’ll be here in a second.” Instead, he said, “Yeah?”

His hair was brown. Not auburn or dirty blonde, or chestnut or light brown, or beech or ash. It was just brown. That’s the only way anyone ever thought of it. It was long, past his chin, and fell over his face, so that only the tip of his nose peaked through the unkempt veil. His hair was greasy, like his face, and dirty, like his jacket, as if it hadn’t been washed in weeks, beginning to matt slightly in some areas, like the loose strings on his beaten Converse, old and faded and scribbled on, like his torn jeans. His eyes were enormous, but you’d never know it, being so carefully hidden by his hair. His eyes were wide and hazel: not quite brown, not quite green. His lashes were brown too, and oh so long that when he closed his eyes they brushed the tops of his cheekbones. His lips were small and perfect, like doll’s lips: pristine and pink. He was a skinny kid. Slender. He looked delicate. You’d never know that he wasn’t. You’d never have guessed just from looking at him how strong he was.

I looked at him. Hard. I pushed the hair out of his eyes and kissed the bridge of his nose, between his eyes. He stared at me, in that off way that people do when they’re looking right at you but not really looking at you at all. His eyes swallowed me, and for a full second I was absorbed by each line on his face. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but said nothing, and stopped. Because he knew that I knew what he was going to say. He was going to say that he needed to be alone, that he didn’t want to talk right now, that he didn’t want to see me right now, and he’d call me later. But, then again, he knew that I knew all that was bullshit.

“I’m not what you’ve made me out to be,” he said. His voice was deep and thick, like molasses, it poured over me hotly, slowly, lazily. “And,” he continued just as lazily, “I don’t think I understand what we’re supposed to be. So I want to go home, and I want to watch TV, and I want to forget that I was ever confused like this.”

He had never spoken to me like that, and I was startled by the stream of words which had just poured from his mouth like alcohol over me, helping me find those small wounds all over which one didn’t know one had.

I let out a low dry hiss. I put a hand on the back of his head and knotted my fingers into his hair. It was thick and tough, like a rug between my clean fingers. He concentrated his large eyes on a small mole I knew I had on the side of my neck.

“I think,” I began slowly, determined and distant, so that my voice sounded unfamiliar even to me. “I think you think way too much.”

He shrugged his narrow shoulders and lowered his gaze further to his abused sneakers, determined not to say more than he absolutely had to.

We were sitting on a green park bench. He was smoking, but he hadn’t put the cigarette to his lips since he lit it; the end had formed a long dissolving bar of ash that cigarettes form when lit and never moved. A person ran by in front of us carrying a small child of three that was bawling its tiny eyes out, as they ran in opposite direction of the horse that had now gone entirely mental. Four policemen ran by in front of us, two were running in direction of the horse, and the other two were running in direction of the traffic jam; two of those policemen ran into each other.

“I think,” I began again. “You’re making this friendship out to seem like more than it really is. Because it’s not…” I paused and looked at him, his hair over his face. I scrunched up my nose. “What you think it is.” He gave no sign of having heard me. I looked over at him sideways. I liked doing that. From that angle I could see just how thin he was, like a flat board. It made me want to hug him. I liked the way his smooth chest felt when I wrapped my arms around it. I realized I still had my fingers laced through the hair at the back of his head, but I didn’t move them. Instead, I did something monumentally stupid, something I knew I’d regret, something that at saner times of my life I would have stopped, thought about rationally, and vetoed against it. But I just went ahead and did it anyway, because I had nothing to loose but Polanski, and I was going to loose him to himself anyway.

I used my firm grip in his hair to pull his head back. The hair fell out of his face like a bad wig. He didn’t look angry, or startled, or even mildly surprised, just sort of bored, every day indifference, as if this were something he knew were coming, something he dealt with everyday: no surprises. I kissed him, and he didn’t pull away, nor did he kiss back. I kissed him a little harder, a little fuller, and then a little deeper. His lips felt like satin against mine, cold and velvety, as appose to mine which must have felt like sandpaper to him. How could a guy take such good care of his lips? Eventually he had to respond, and he did so by slowly returning the kiss, in his cute subtle ways. He smelled nice, as he always did. He smelled vaguely like peaches and rose-petals. It came from his hair and his light cloth jacket; but not in the way that a scent had been sprayed upon them, more in the sense that they were merely created that way, like certain flavoured lip glosses that smell and taste like strawberry or grape. One would expect him to taste of peaches and lightly pink roses. But he didn’t.

Then it came to me harsh and cruel, like cold daggers on my face, the cold air against my skin that let me know he was no longer with me, and the delicate yet nasty absence of his lips and his tongue. I opened my eyes and he wasn’t looking at me. I didn’t understand it. His eyes were glazed, distant, more so than usual. His mouth laid a straight, flat, thin line. Not necessarily annoyed. More like bored. He wanted to say something; I could tell by the way his grit his teeth and clenched his jaw. Then I got the strangest feeling of wanting to hurt him. Badly. I’d never felt that way with him before. That strange feeling that starts in the pit of your stomach and feels like the pang of regret, then grows into inexplicable loathing, and turns into a twitch of the fists and makes you feel as if you won’t be able to control them and stop them from severely injuring this person. Then he spoke.

“I don’t want to be your boyfriend. I’m sorry.”

That hate in my stomach became true nausea, and I felt like I was going to be sick on him. What was wrong with him? I had always thought he was a bit off and eccentric, but never truly retarded. But obviously he was. Very utterly retarded. What had ever provoked him to say such a thing? Perhaps he was schizophrenic, and it had been the voices in his head which had told him to say that. It made no sense. It was as if he didn’t know me. As if he didn’t know me at all. How long had we been friends? Years perhaps, it was hard to count. And he goes and says something like that. I wanted to kill him. And on top of all that, he had said “I’m sorry”. Everything else I can handle: the stupidity, the ignorance, the unknown harm that he was doing to me in the inside; but “I’m sorry”? Hate me, disgrace me, insult me, beat me, hurt me, please oh please dear God, hurt me. But please, for Mother’s Mercy, don’t pity me. Don’t pity me for not being able to have you. It’s the worst form of self-flattery, the worst form of arrogance, of narcissism, of “holier than thou” attitude, to believe that you are so good, you are so superior to me, that you feel sorry for me because you have just turned down the “offer” that you think I created and have denied me of yourself. What’s wrong with you?

I don’t think he saw it coming, when I hit him. For a full minute it seemed the whole of the chaos around us stopped to look at us. The tingling in my fists had given way and I had punched him square in the space under his nose and right above his lip. Everything was frozen as I stared at him and he stared at me. It was that one second I remember, the one second between his nerve endings making violent connection with his brain, letting it know he was in severe pain. The nerves clicked, the corners of his enormous eyes watered, a thin trickle of blood began to flow from his nose and his upper lip to crack open simultaneously, and his hands leapt to his face. He cussed and coddled his nose and mouth, rocking back and forth subconsciously. He called me a certain tiny word more than once, and said a certain four letter word far more than a blow to the face deserved, and I became aware of the fact that he probably didn’t know why I hit him. Worse than that, he probably thought I hit because I didn’t like being turned down. So I made the spontaneous decision to explain myself.

“That was for thinking I wanted you to be my boyfriend,” I alluded stoically, icily. From over his hands desperately clutching his nose and lip, I could see his eyes streaming as much tears as his nose did blood, both of which were soaking his already filthy hair. “And this,” I continued dangerously. “Is for saying that you were sorry.” I was barely aware that I had hit him when I already had for a second time. My fist, all on its own accord, following the hinted cue from my words, had driven into his chest with more force than it had pummelled his face. I heard the thud of the air being chased out of his lungs and the very faint crack, which might have been a cracked knuckle. He cried out in a great desperate gasp and doubled over and off the bench. As he went falling forward onto his knees, I saw a jet of blood spew from between his fingers. It landed as a crimson pool on the porous gravel. He just sat there for a bit, doubled over, his forehead against the pavement, his hands on his face. I knew he was struggling to breath, but I had no pity. I don’t pity those who pity me. And more than anything, I didn’t pity him because the wounds he had caused me stung more than his bloody nose ever would. I stood up and bent over to pick up his head by his tangled hair. He was all sort of limp and he let his hands fall to the ground when I forced him to sit up, so I could see what a bloody mess had become of his face. I must have hit a vein or something, because it’s hard to think I could cause that much damage to anyone’s face.

“It’s not your fault,” I granted indifferently. “That’s just the way it is.” And I walked away, cutting through the park to avoid the horse and the angry citizens stuck in traffic jam.

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