C LA R I T Y

The wind stifled his breath—the tight, polluted air of the city cultivated dirty cities of their own in his lungs. Through the smog and ash, dust and the dizziness, fog and snow, Jonathan thought the world could not be seen with greater clarity.

Standing on top of the two-story building, he stood with arms outstretched over his world. Like God, he thought, amused—or perhaps rather like Atlas—and held his breath. From down below he swore he could see Gary, the friendly neighborhood hobo he always passed by on his way to work, looking up at him with child eyes. He was just a gray blur now, just something far away and intangible through the thick wind.

It was a snow-drenched January, a New York morning. The skies loomed angrily overhead, threatening to shower ice cinders at the pedestrians and the homeless, on Gary and his flaming barrel and on Manhattan lawyers’ suitcases. Everyone is equal under the power of God, he thought.

Now looming above the world, he felt he was no longer below it—supporting it. The world was the cross he always carried on his back. One day he knew he’d be put up on the face of the world for all to see—crucified.

The condensation and his uncannily warm skin were invitation enough for long hairs to be taped to his face, protecting it from the biting wind. His eyes were heavy and tired from looking through the smog and splintered dust. His hands felt chalky and awkward as he preformed his balancing act on the top of the mailroom building. His one of three jobs.

“Fuck you, just go to New York and be a writer,” Tanya said. They were on the Playland docks. The tide was coming in. The land was bathed in a burnt-gold and crimson illumination from off in the distance. He watched as the shadows grew longer behind Tanya and shorter on her face as she turned back to the water.

“Nah,” he said, blowing smokestacks from his mouth. “Where would I even live?” he asked tiredly.

Tanya paused in thought. She looked back at him with a caring smile. “My sister has an apartment with her boyfriend in Brooklyn. I called her about it last week. She wouldn’t mind putting you up for a while if you paid third of the rent.”

He stood thinking, throwing his cigarette into the water below. He watched it sizzle out in the water. The sun still lingered in the sky and warmed his bare arms.

“I’ll think about it.”

That had been four years ago. Why had that come to mind? Tanya had been beautiful that day, though. He had never known his memory to be that vibrant. He could remember summers in Rye with absolute clarity, now. His grandmother had been rich and owned a house there. It would have been sold by now.

Tanya, that sweet girl who lived next door, would always smile at him. She smiled every summer he visited. He would have loved for her see him like this—at the end of his figurative rope. Like his smoking fag that day on the docks, he felt he could fall victim to the great eternal sea. He was falling into a sea of sorts. Base-level grit-snow, mud-caked sewage awaited a grand gesture. But he would wait, if only for the time being, to walk on water. Like Jesus himself, thought Jonathan with a smirk.

One foot dangled over the edge of his universe, enticing. His loose shoe fell to the ground dispassionately. He made an evaluating glance downward, and pulled his foot back. The sky rumbled. If he was going to jump, he should jump before the storm.

A barrage of arms and hands and knees and feet bruised tender flesh, skin, bones. Like a misbehaving puppy, he was kicked into the corner. Forced into unnatural sleep, he woke hours later, washed the caked blood from his lip and headed downstairs for dinner.

He opened the cupboard. Awesome, Frosted Flakes! He remembered the commercial. Finding a cracked bowl in the sink, he washed it off and got out milk and a spoon. Later, he found a clean white collared shirt hidden in the back of his dresser. The boy ran water through his hair and combed it back. He slipped the collared shirt over his shoulders and left the house, buttoning it up halfway out the door.

He took his bike out of the garage and rode it down to the local library in town. Locking his bike up at the site, he strode into the building familiarly. He quickly skimmed over the Religion section of the building casually, remembering that book on Ancient Greek Mythology he’d found just a couple weeks earlier.

Walking back into the Classic Literature section, he ran his hands over his favorites. Finally, he settled on Nabokov. Resting a moment after his hot pursuit, he fell purposefully on the library floor and dove into the pages. He escaped to somewhere else: somewhere perhaps ugly, but infinitely more beautiful.

Strolling up to the front desk, he pulled out his card for checkout and smiled at the middle-aged woman at the front desk. “Hello, Jonathan,” she said, “Is this it for today? Oh, Nabokov. I remember reading this when I was in college,” she looked down at the boy and smiled thoughtfully.

“I’m doing fine, Mrs. Deedler. That’s about it. It’s nothing I can’t handle, but I don’t want to miss anything by rushing it and taking out more than one book, y’know?” The woman nodded.

“Of course,” she stamped the card and looked over her shoulder at her computer. “Are you finished with the other two books? The Hemingway is due back tomorrow,” she warned.

“Oh yeah,” he said. He tried to sound confident, but his stomach started to hurt, remembering. The woman eyed him curiously.

“Do you have the books, Jonathan?” The boy nodded, but couldn’t speak. “You know I don’t mean to pry, but if the books are lost, you don’t need to buy them back for the library. We don’t even buy them at market price. We get a discount from the distributors. You only pay a small fee to the library for the book.” The boy interrogated silently the scratch on his shoe.

“My father…” he said at last. “He doesn’t like books.”

“Oh?” she said. “Not much of a reader?” The boy laughed, agreeing.

“Yeah, something like that.”

The woman put the slip into the book. “So, how is seventh grade so far?”

He shrugged. “The reading is boring.”

Gripping the handles to his bike as he rode back home, he could feel the swelling pain in his body pulsate. At four hundred fifty-one degrees, paper burns. All those pages consumed in flames seared his body, like his father was burning him up in the fire.

Cleaning up the ash that flew out from the fireplace, he thought of things that had been lost. The boy cleared his mind, and instead decided to think of something more proactive. He took one of the six-packs from his fridge and poured each bottle down the sink. He went in back of the house and hid the empty pack behind the moldy wooden shed. With the motivator gotten rid off, he had hoped the fires would, too.

The sky rumbled above. His memories kept plaguing him. Listening keenly to the world around him for a suggestion, an utterance of a command, he heard nothing but the silencing din of the orchestra of sound. “What do I do now?” he shouted fiercely in his mind, but his voice was nothing more than a whisper to the world. “Should I jump?” From down below, on Earth, many languages were being spoken. He swore he heard Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, every version of American slang and Ebonics, but no answers to his questions.

His foot was getting colder. It had to be done now. Suspicions would be raised if he went back into the building with one shoe missing. Perhaps even his sanity would be scrutinized, as maybe it ought to have been. At 4:00, he would have to go to the deli two blocks over until eight. Then he was the night guard for a local nursing home until three in the morning. Sometimes he made sandwiches for the old people at the home as a late night treat. Then everything would just start all over again. Do I want it to start all over again? rang in the back of his mind.

His arms went numb. How long had he been there with arms outstretched? He stepped back over the stone railing for a moment, and sat on the snowy concrete of the building’s roof. Doubts started to filter through his mind. Did the monotony of life warrant death?

“He’s a really great guy,” she said that day on the docks. Twilight had overcome the glow of the day. The last dying embers of daylight burned on the hearth’s horizon. He looked off into the distance. He put the cigarette up to his mouth again and took a long drag. She waited patiently.

“That’s good,” he said finally, slowly. From the corner of his eye, he watched Tanya look down the boardwalk at the people climbing into their cars, walking their dogs back to their houses, old men pulling their fishing rods out of the water at the far end of the dock, and kids riding their bikes back home. The day was over.

“Are you going to go to New York?” she asked. “You’d get a good start there,” she said when he didn’t answer. “There’s nothing for you here.” There was nothing. His father had died of liver failure, leaving a legacy of alcoholism and dark vanishing bruises on his son’s skin, washed away by the shores of time. Tanya was moving on, without him. “The tide’s coming in,” Tanya said.

“I noticed.” He turned to her and smiled. I love you. “It’s getting late. Let’s go catch some dinner?” he asked. She smiled back.

“So, New York?”

“Yeah, New York.”

Tanya,” he said, not knowing where the word had come from. He hadn’t heard from her since that summer. “Tanya,” he said again. They had dated once in high school. It didn’t mean anything. They parted as friends. Memories rewound themselves in time: moving to New York, tripping over the trash in the street—human trash, working for survival, dreams scrapped in order to put something in his mouth every night.

“Tanya,” he said again. “Why did you leave me?” he said breathlessly. Her sun-bleached hair and sparkling sea-foam green eyes were etched into his memory. Every hit and punch and kick was returning to summers in Rye, the sun against his arm, and Tanya’s smile. Every charred book was a reason to keep reading. Every discouraging look from his father was another reason to live his life, to write, to breathe. Everything he had built his life around had disappeared, was washed away by time. And, he thought, at his last moment of epiphany—of a final spiritual release—he was stunted by his own fear of letting go of the world he had come to hate.

Up on the roof, Jonathan remembered who he really was, and what he had to do.

“I held up the world, like Atlas,” he said silently. Only now he realized he didn’t have to anymore. Though his vision has deteriorated by the cold and smog and the grime, his mind was illuminated in brilliant clarity. He understood.