3Souls: An Ancient Uptown Love Triangle
By John Heers
Text copyright © 2020 John Heers
All rights reserved
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are entirely the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or incidents and events is entirely coincidental.
Now, let us begin…
PROLOGUE
As from a broken blister the words bleed from my mouth.
“Why Mitkin?”
Mitkin looks at me, his eyes so blue I long for a second look.
“Is that really why you’re here, David?”
I drum my fingers on the table and grind my teeth. Mitkin is reaching out from the past and poking me again with his bony mind. I can’t take it. I ask again louder.
“Why, Mitkin?”
“David, I never intended, in my heart I never—”
“Never what?”
Mitkin turns melancholy. “There’s so much to say. First you, David. Tell me why you’re here.”
Why am I here? Why am I in this dank, piss-beige waiting room with greasy tables and hulking vending machines stocked full of day-old cuisine sold by the box, special treats bought by doleful relatives who plug away with plastic tokens because real money isn’t allowed here? Why have I come to this human meat locker to visit this half-man, a man I’ve avoided for nearly fourteen years?
An enormous pile of rubble rises in my soul and against it I feel myself lean, resigned again to use it as a crutch, not willing to take it apart as Mitkin is now asking me to do. No, this heap is too large and too dirty for mortal men like myself, the answers buried within too disquieting.
An otherworldly dynamite is what I need, a terrible explosive I don’t own and never have. But Mitkin cares little for my mealy silence. He just keeps staring, waiting for me to take apart the junk heap, saying he’ll tell all if only I do the same. And somewhere inside, I feel a compulsion that makes me want to comply, to make the deal, to let it all go and revisit the past entirely so that finally I can move on with my life. Isn’t that why I’ve come? Isn’t that the whole point?
I start to feel sticky and sweaty, I start to feel dirty. I desperately want to move, leave, walk away, but I stay. As I sit here now, writing about this first day with Mitkin, only ten days removed, I realize that all of it has been like a locomotive. This moment has been looming for a long time, thundering down the tracks, once a long way off, but now whistling and roaring out of my soul. And what makes it all unbearable is that Mitkin seems to be driving this crap heap of a train. Mitkin is the goddamned conductor.
“I’m asking the questions, Mitkin. Why did you do it?”
“David,” he pleads.
“Why?”
He dumps his words in a raw lump. “I didn’t know love.”
I’ve heard these words before but not from him. I’ve heard this from Raphaella, spoken with the same sorrowful tone, the same resignation and the same gentle humility. In his mouth, the words rattle me and cut me and stir me about. Laden as they are with the burden of lost love and the still unvarnished memories of beauty and separation, his words bring me to the brink of tears.
Then from a perch behind an elevated desk, a guard wearing the tag Sgt. Rigliano announces that visiting hours are over. Over? I rub my eyes to clear my mind. Mitkin stands up and I follow his lead, hoping he will yell to the guard that we need more time. Instead Mitkin says to me, “You coming back?”
“What?” I manage.
The guard thunders “Let’s go!” and people start to hug and say their farewells.
Mitkin peers up. “Rocky, how about a couple more minutes?”
“Can’t do it, Mitkin.”
I ask suddenly, “Is the warden in?” A host of visitors turn and look as I ask again. “Is Warden Riley in right now?”
Sergeant Rigliano checks his watch. “First of all, relax. Second, yeah, the Warden’s in. Where else he gonna be?” With an encumbered wave of his big tattooed arm, Rocky Rigliano ushers everyone out. We line up and shuffle toward the door, Mitkin and I side by side.
“So, you’ll come back then?”
For fourteen years I’ve been stalling, running from this day, and now, as if shackled, I can’t get loose. All of this is making me physically tired. “Uh, yeah,” I say. “I’ll come back… yeah. I’ll come.”
I leave Mitkin and pull myself across a well-kept courtyard, through three sliding steel doors and into the administrative offices of the prison. I know this complex well because this is where I have waited while my beloved daughter spent entire afternoons chatting with the man who catapulted New York City into an infamous inferno, and the city that is my soul into ruins. The secretary ushers me in immediately.
“I’ve got to see him again,” I say to the warden. “Mitkin,” I say, louder. “I’ve got to see him so I can finish my story.” I nearly say life instead of story. Life. Story.
“What story, David?”
“Mine, and it’s long.”
“Your daughter never mentioned that you were a writer, you write?” The warden looked at me over his smudged reading glasses.
“Yeah, I do, I mean I am.”
And then I think about how I haven’t written anything for years, how I’ve been broken by a hell-hewn writer’s block that has crushed my career. And then I think, nearly aloud, writing career? And that thought makes me feel very lazy and very wry, and in a weird way, soiled too.
“Well, of course you can see him again then,” says the warden. “Given all that you’ve been through, Dana’s visits here and their relationship, sure.” He smiles. “How is your daughter by the way? Such a sweet thing.”
I breathe and begin to think of Dana. She is my daughter, the fruit of my union with Raphaella Hurston and the one who, inexplicably, has devoted herself to visiting Mitchell Mitkin. She started coming to Saginaw State Prison at thirteen, maybe four times a year, and then more often as she got old enough to drive, borrowing my car and leaving very early to make the drive north. We had many arguments over these visits, especially when his letters would show up in our mailbox. I told her she was consorting with an evil man and she told me I was resentful and that I didn’t know love.
I didn’t know love. Inevitably, remembering her mother, I would relent, but until today I hated her trips to the state prison. Until today, I was wracked by them.
“David?” The warden plumbs my daydream. “How much time do you need?”
I know he is asking me how much time I need with Mitkin, but my mind drifts, still picturing Dana and how I hated her for coming here. Something cosmic, I think to myself, something her mother would call metanoia. “A week.” I ask for one entire week out of my life. For him.
The warden is astounded too. “With Mitkin? What do you mean a week?”
“I need to see him every day for a week, every day for three or four hours or as many as I need to finish, uh, the book.” I pause. “Please, Warden Riley, a week and then I’ll forget about Mitkin.”
He laughs and his meaty jowls jiggle, reminding me of Santa Claus. “You’ve become like your daughter, David, her time up here has rubbed off on you.”
I hold a plastic smile. “A week then?”
Watching the warden, I can see him go from irritation to incomprehension to resignation. It’s as if he realizes this is not for him. “I’ll clear it.”
And that is that.
I rent a hotel room just up the road, a mud-brown Motel 6 room. This is where I’ve been for the last ten days, gutting and disgorging my story, our story, under the glow of a little yellow lamp. It is from here that I call my department chair back in New York and let him know that I need the rest of the week off, telling him and now believing I have a family emergency. I’ve begun my personal transformation, my journey back to my soul, to my daughter and to her mother, to the very people who have confounded and captivated me for my entire adult life.
***
It is the next day and I’ve been given a little side room adjacent to the main visiting area. To my surprise, Warden Riley has provided me with pen and paper, long yellow legal pads that stretch out in front of me, my only comfort now, the only thing left between him and me. I startle when the door clicks and slides open, revealing like a Broadway curtain the man who’d become the improbable lead in my very own Greek tragedy. I get up to face him. Standing, I clear my throat but do not speak. I can’t speak, actually. I search my mind for a good place to start, but it’s a roiling, glaring, polychromatic mess. I dart from thoughts of Raphaella and her Transylvanian father to the manic, makeshift homeless shelter and dumb Andy Seever. I bound between bullet holes and arson and the overthrow of the New York City public school system. I entertain flash images of Mitkin’s ugly friend and cult leader, a guy the world would come to know as Ed Taughtauer, juxtaposed a dour Dostoevsky who is bear hugging me and kissing me cheek to cheek, a million dollars piled cartoonishly in a brown oak bucket at our feet. And still I can’t find anything to say. This is really stupid, I think, but then Mitkin speaks sheepishly.
“Dana told me this would happen. That you’d come to me.”
“Is that right?” I say.
“She said you were a good man.”
I waggle and roll my eyes. “Well, meeting with you hardly makes me a good man, besides, maybe this isn’t about you at all.” I look down. “Maybe it’s about something else.”
He nods. “Maybe, maybe so.”
There is an awkward silence until finally he says, “Shall we sit?”
I nod and we sit. Another awkward silence. I scribble the words calm and creepy on a legal pad.
“Where shall we begin?” he asks.
“At the beginning.”
He leans back in his chair, twines his fingers together just under his chin and sighs a peaceful sigh. Another long pause makes me think I should be saying something, but looking again I see he is meditating, or praying maybe. Really? This is not the same man I knew before, not the same man at all.
“David, when you write all this down and turn it into your memoir, could you do one thing?” Mitkin leans forward. “It won’t be easy, this thing, it will be almost impossible.” His eyes burn. “Could you tell the truth?”
“The truth?” It sort of slides out of my mouth.
“For her, perfectly?”
For her, he says. Like he loves her, like he cares for her. How odd, how sickening it sounds. I hate him. Then into my silent rage, his hand. He takes mine in his and says, softly, “Forgive me, David.”
I am confused and defused all in the same moment. I don’t know how long we sit before he asks, “Do you remember the day I moved in?” I nod. “Can we start there?”
“Yes. Start there.”
CHAPTER I - Mitchell Mitkin
Damn, I thought. What time is it?
The doorbell was making a pit, pit, paaaat, paaaat and hurry up sound. Raphaella jumped up first and walked naked to the intercom. I rolled over into the warmth she’d left.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“Mitkin, Mitchell, your new neighbor. Please open the door, thank you.” He said all of this quickly and orderly.
“Mitchell?” repeated Raphaella.
Neither of us knew Mitkin was moving in this day, and neither of us expected him to ring if he did. He had no reason to; his father owned the building.
“Hello? It’s Martin Mitkin’s son, Mitchell. I’m the heir to this building, the building that you live in for four hundred dollars a month. The lease, by the way, runs out in October. Open the door please. Thank you.” Some static came through the intercom. I dragged myself out of the bed and pulled Raphaella’s hand off the two-way talk button.
“Let me go down there and deal with this guy. I mean, what’s his deal?”
She looked plainly at me. “His deal is his father owns the building.”
I blinked. “And I own a bed and want to be in it…”
“No,” she snapped, “that’s my bed, and you sleep too much as it is.” Then under her breath she whispered something cruel, or at least it sounded cruel, and then she rolled her eyes. She put her finger back on the intercom but it wouldn’t buzz. There was no sound. She sucked air through her clenched teeth. “Go and let him in, and tell him his father needs to fix the buzzer, it hasn’t worked right for a week.” She opened the door and stared me out. I cowered and left, but not before a parcel of thought tumbled through my mind: Daybreak with Raphaella was never as good as nightfall. Never.
I descended three flights of stairs and could hear Mitkin ring the bell two more times. There were two front doors, one opening into a tiny foyer, the second into the building itself. Mitkin had already come through the first door and was doggedly waiting, peeking around a little curtain that covered the window on the inside, pushing his face against the glass and gawking.
He was switching from one eye and one vantage point to the other, back and forth, like a mad sleuth. Against the thick, heavy glass his face looked distorted. It was aquiline to be sure, and it was stern. I opened the door and immediately he walked in, resolutely studying every nook and corner, bouncing questions and answers back and forth between his eyes and his mind. And then he rested on me. He stood about six feet tall, his eyes sky blue, his face long and sharp and dominated by a strong, imposing nose. Forcefully, like a cop directing traffic, he stuck out his hand.
“Hello, I’m Mitchell Mitkin.” I just stared. He extended his hand an extra inch, imploring me to take it and shake it. I didn’t. “You must be a visitor because my father rents to Raphaella Hurston, and she’s a woman.” He dropped his outstretched hand. “You are?” I wanted to laugh because he was so stiff like a bad actor, and so old for his age.
“David.”
“Just David?” he said.
“Yeah, just David.”
He waited for me to add more and when I didn’t he briskly looked away. Then after a short pause he nodded. He walked past me and up the stairs. Turning around, he stopped and looked down on me.
“David, if you are angry because I woke you up early, well I didn’t plan to. Someone vandalized the lock last night and I was not able to use my key. My guess is, your key, Ms. Hurston’s key that is, will not work either. I have already arranged to have a locksmith come, in fact he is on the way. When he is finished I will provide Raphaella Hurston with a new set of keys and I will also, of course, supply myself. This means it is unlikely that I will ever wake either of you up early on a Saturday morning again.” He paused ceremoniously. “If Ms. Hurston is interested in greeting her new neighbor she can find him in the U-Haul truck outside, in the hall here, or in the apartment upstairs.” He turned away quickly, took one step forward up the staircase, and looked back. “I trust you know how it is to move into a new apartment, things happen.” With this he jerked himself back around and ascended the steps to the second floor.
“What a little wank,” I said under my breath.
I took a peek outside and saw his truck. It sat trailer first, halfway up the sidewalk. I fought the sleep still in my muscles and trudged to the third floor where Raphaella was making tea. The kettle sang to a boil.
“This guy is crazy, Raphie!”
With no response I stuck my head around the corner to hear her say, “These things are a pain in my ass. Crap.” And then in the bathroom, I heard the teeming tin-tapping of scattering pills. “Come on! What the…” I pulled the tea off the stove and headed down the hall toward the bathroom.
Raphaella emerged, her face a receding red. “Can you believe these damn things? How’s a woman like me supposed to have the patience for this? Look.” She thrust an empty bottle in my face. “Every last one of them on the floor.” I nodded and she sauntered past me into the kitchen. She opened and then slammed shut a cupboard door. I scooped up the scattered pills and followed her into the kitchen.
“You met Mitkin?”
“Downstairs. He’s crazy you know. He’s—”
“Like nobody you’ve ever met? I know. I’ve spoken to him on the phone. He thinks he knows everything and I’m not so sure he doesn’t.” She pulled out a teacup with one hand while clutching the toaster in the other. “He’s a little nerd. Reminds me of his father.” Wearing only her bra, I noticed her bulbous belly. It stopped me.
“Look at that. Look at my baby, he’s going to be a solid, fat baby.” I walked over to rub her belly but she took my hand and put it to my head.
“If he’s fat, it’s your genes, the fat genes you got in your fat head.” And with a little inglorious laugh she snatched her mug and headed down the long hall to the living room. I watched her go and fought the urge to curse her. I should have fought the next urge too, but I didn’t. Nope, I followed her down that hall in search of her approval, not sure what I’d say or why. In the living room she ensconced herself in the only comfortable chair in the apartment, sprawling unbridled despite her near nakedness. This was nothing new; she often walked around naked, defiantly passing in front of windows, nonchalantly exposing her beautiful brown body. With her skin supping on the recliner’s lush leather she clicked on the television and slurped from her cup.
I slithered up and leaned against the wall, my head dangling into the room, not altogether invited, but in, nonetheless. “Seriously Raphie, this guy is intense. I think he wants us to come down and help him move in, I had to kind of make him know he was rude. I think he realized it.”
“No he didn’t,” she quipped, still staring at the television.
“How do you know?”
“Because he doesn’t realize things like that. He doesn’t care about being polite, or normal behavior, he’s more like a machine.” She stopped to sip her tea and a bloated pause stilled the room. “I kind of like the way he is, actually. It gets rid of all the crap most people spend their whole life wading through. You know? I mean you’re familiar with that?” She waited. “Right?”
There was a thud and then some hammering. I looked contemptuously at Raphaella. “Yeah, wow, he sounds really, really great.” She didn’t look at me, and instead paged through the Daily News. More than a few silent moments passed as page by page she turned my stomach and boiled my blood. Like the newspaper, I’d become a distraction.
There was another bang and some more hammering. Raphaella looked at me.
“Why don’t you go help him,” she said. “It’s his first time living on his own for God’s sake. Help him out. You’ll probably learn something. He’s on his way to Columbia you know, wants to study biology.”
I was amazed. “That guy’s only just now going to college? He looks like he’s forty-five.”
“I know. I think it’s his eyes. Did you notice how blue they were?”
Her tone was a little too tender, so I lied. “Nah, I didn’t notice.”
“You will, you will.” With that Raphaella got up, went to the bathroom and sat heavily on the toilet. She sighed. I imagined her saying something like, “Could you please leave me alone or is the toilet the only place I can get some peace?” Was it the hormones or was it just me, just us? I turned around and marched out the front door.
Mitkin’s door gently knocked open and I peeked inside. He had already carried up a large box and a drawer full of clothes. Tightly tucked balls of cotton socks lay all over. He had dumped a gunnysack full of bricks against the wall that probably accounted for the thud. What does he want with a big bag of bricks? I went in a few more steps and saw a large box of books. I grabbed one. It was David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. I put it back and grabbed another, this one entitled Ethics Without God. Another was exceptionally fat and looked like a biology textbook. I put that one back too; its width made me nervous. I left the books and turned to leave when Mitkin walked in carrying an armful of plastic crates filled to capacity.
“So she made you come down and help me move in, huh?” He peeked around his load. “Women.” He kept talking as he moved away from me, stepping over boxes and making his way to the kitchen. I imagined that he never stood still.
“I stuck a nickel between the door and the frame so you can come and go as you please. The truck is open too. Thanks.” He moved tactically, reminding me of a highly skilled, highly efficient Roman soldier, or maybe an Army Corps engineer. He gave me the creeps, yet his confident, calculated cadence was hypnotic. I succumbed to it involuntarily.
Mitkin’s father, Martin Mitkin, was a respected professor at Columbia and had only recently bought this building at 102 E.103rd Street. He had negotiated a good deal on it from a trustee with whom he had worked on some project. The elder Mitkin was the department chair of biology and a retired physician renowned for his work on organ transplants. And he was a philanthropist. He had donated millions to public schools and their science programs, and as the chief executive of a multimillion dollar foundation called Science Now, he was renowned. Mitchell Mitkin had grown up in Martin’s suburban household an only child, an exceptional only child, whose welfare was closely monitored by Martin himself. Both parents doted. Mitchell’s mother worked in real estate after her son was old enough to go to school, but she never got over not being his full-time mother and indulged him even at the age of nineteen, especially at the age of nineteen. The thought of him living alone in this Manhattan apartment terrified her. Her fear had less to do with the big city and more to do with his outlook on life. She agonized about his inability to relate to youthful things; the simple, soft and loving things his mother had spent so much time trying to give him.
“She’s far too emotional,” he told me as he stood in the foyer. I had taken a seat on a box of books while he robotically divulged a matter-of-fact monologue of his life to date. “My mother doesn’t always get it, if you know what I mean.”
“What about your dad?” I said. “How’s he with you moving in?”
“He only charges me half the rent. I feel like that’s acceptable for now, but when I am able to make more I will pay more. It should be soon. School won’t be so hard.”
“But why pay? I mean your pops sounds willing to pay.”
“He is willing to pay but I am not willing to be a millstone around his neck. Millstones are heavy—the Rolling Rock millstone upstate weighed nearly eleven thousand pounds, large for its day.” He looked me dead in the eye waiting for a response, but how does one respond to uninvited information about colonial millstones? “Look,” he snapped, “I don’t want to burden my father. First high school, then college, then grad school, then teaching and then research. This is a long process. Expensive. I can’t just expect payments, I look at it like the, the... the disentanglement of the self.” He paused as I silently mouthed his word disentanglement. “Not accepting his money is a move toward monetary and intellectual independence, you know, taking care of my own business, my own self. If I do, one day I become like him and if I don’t, I become a waste of skin, a nothing.”
Looking at him, his eyes breathing a cold blue and his sandy hair a bit disheveled, I wondered how a kid comes to act like this, think like this. This guy was consumed with his ideas, the first among them the idea of intellectual independence, not exactly a chart-topper for most beer-swilling college freshmen. His deep, penetrating eyes, almost always furrowed, pointed to a boy driven to know something greater than childhood.
But Mitkin’s intensity wasn’t entirely offensive, in fact, it was contagious at times, and standing there I wondered if maybe I should try harder to know what he knows, be like him. But then there was the other thing there in that room with us, with him. I sensed that he protested too much, as if he were burying something, something ugly and sad. The thought crossed my mind that he’d been cocooned, and that maybe this excessive sheltering drove him to crave control. I imagined a dark night and a young owl raised in a zoo, and I imagined that young owl being let loose into the night. Weird, I know, but so was Mitkin.
I laughed, “Well, if you won’t take his money, I will.” He chuckled too, but only a bit.
“Do you need money?” he asked, looking at me.
I floundered, “No, no, not really, I was just joking.” But I did need money. I always needed money in those days before the birth of our child. In fact, I always needed money, period.
“If you need money I can get it for you, just let me know.”
“I will,” I said, thinking to myself how odd it was that this rigid, rather rude guy also had a generous side. The door-buzz sounded and ended our little conversation. At the front door stood a locksmith with a thick, unshaven face and mussed hair. Mitkin opened the front door and immodestly shook his hand, just as he had wanted to shake mine.
“Mitchell Mitkin, I am the one who called. This lock has been tampered with and we need a new one. You do sell locks on site, don’t you?” By “on site” I took him to mean here, standing in front of the apartment, at 7:45 a.m., on a Saturday morning. I knew the answer.
“You’ll have to go to the shop when it opens at nine. Here’s my card. But maybe you don’t need a new lock. Let me take a look.” The locksmith walked by Mitkin and into the foyer. He assumed it was an interior lock, not the front door, and Mitkin let him go but not without giving me this saturated look, the kind he’d flashed me earlier, a look that bled arrogance.
“Excuse me, locksmith,” he said, “the lock is right here. And no, you won’t be able to fix it unless you have a method for drying cyanoacrylate.” He paused with a sarcastic smile. “Though I doubt you do, the sun and thousands of years is about the only method for drying super glue, and you won’t get much sun in that little hole, will you?” He pointed at the door. The tubby locksmith returned and bent over.
“Yep, you’re right kid. Gonna need a new one.” Mitkin gave me another saturated smile, holding it uncharitably. The locksmith, guileless, replied with a straight face, “You’re gonna want a—”
“Medeco, deadbolt. Nonretractable. Seventy-nine ninety-nine. We’ll be in by 9:30. We need keys too.” He poked a glance my way.
“We make keys,” said the locksmith.
“Really? Oh perfect, we’ll be by.”
The locksmith left and I waited for Mitkin to laugh at the locksmith, smugly. He didn’t. I watched as he just turned and occupied himself with keeping the door open. “You know a lot about locks, man.”
The sun was breaking through the rows of trees that lined the street and the clear, crisp morning air intimated a more sweltering afternoon. I wanted to get the moving over so I could go about the business of enjoying my Saturday. I got the feeling he expected me to go with him to the hardware store so I began to invent stories in my head. I need to paint my house. I have matinee tickets for Cats. I have to swing by the heliport. I hate moving things that are heavy, especially other people’s heavy things. He spoke before I could think of a good one.
“Do you drink beer?”
“Sure.”
“Which?”
“Guinness,” I said.
“How about going with me to get a cold beer and the keys in a couple hours. We’ll toast to new neighbors, new keys and newborn babies. How about it?”
“Babies? Raphaella and I are having a baby.” I smiled at him but his pursed lips told me he knew this already, and that, well, that was the reason he’d brought it up, idiot. I felt like the locksmith must have felt. “How did you know?” I asked.
“My father told me. I guessed you were the father, and you are.”
“How does your father know?
“She told him.”
Why? I thought.
“Does your father talk to her often?” I tried to sound compliant, but inside a sea of jealousy swelled. And yes, it is utterly absurd that I could feel jealousy in this situation, but I did, and it was real, and really annoying.
“You sound resentful,” said Mitkin, as if on cue.
“About what?”
“That’s what I’m asking you. Why are you jealous that your girlfriend’s landlord knows your girlfriend is pregnant?” He sort of rolled his eyes. “Who worries about that?”
Put this way sure, it sounded pretty silly, but not silly enough to stem the rolling tide. “Look, I’m not jealous, I was just wondering how you knew. Besides, who are you anyway?”
He looked at me, perplexed. It was as if I had been a toy whose head he’d made pop off. He just stared at me, a little dejected that I was so mad. A stilted silence lingered and it struck me that I was in a fight with a guy I barely knew, a guy who was indisputably odd, and incontrovertibly compelling. He was also a neighbor now, and the landlord’s son, and I wasn’t even on the lease. Any lease. Anywhere.
“Look,” I said. “Sorry for that. I’m oversensitive maybe. Sorry.” The whole scene was pathetic, and it made me despise the thought of sharing a beer with him. We got upstairs with the last of the boxes and needed only to move a couch, a television and his bed. I began to realize that without me he couldn’t move in at all. Where was his help? Was he just always alone? Possible, I thought. Sitting in his apartment, amid boxes and boxes of books, I asked about his father.
“He couldn’t make it.” His voice trembled slightly. “He has small cell carcinoma.”
Small cell carcinoma? “What?” I said.
“Small cell carcinoma of the lungs. But he’ll be okay.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, thinking that I’d better be.
“Why?” he intoned. “Don’t be sorry. If you think about it then you won’t be sorry. It’s simple, not sorry. His body has a flat and the repairmen are going to fix it. I go and see him once a day. He’s on his way back, he’s doing just fine.”
“Well, I hope they fix him up.”
“They will. They will. There’s no doubt. It’s amazing the things we have learned about our bodies since getting rid of the irrational beliefs of the past.” I nodded incompletely, tentatively. Sitting on the same box I’d perused earlier, I was reminded of the Treatise of Human Nature and the Ethics Without God, two books that now dug like tridents into my thigh. They, I thought, are leaving a mark on me. “With the new medicines,” he continued, “and new ways of thinking, well, we’ll get my father fixed right up.”
“Did you learn that from these books,” I pointed between my legs.
“From those books? Oh, yeah, from some of those books anyway. The ones in that box help us make sense of the world. Especially Hume. Hume’s in there right?” I nodded and he looked at me suspiciously. “How did you know that?”
“I… I saw it just now when I sat down.”
He gazed and then continued, “Anyway, Hume makes sense because he admits.” I must have cocked my head or raised an eyebrow, like a dog teased by a squeaky toy. “Admits knowing nothing, nothing but what is given to him through his five senses.” His hand showed five outstretched fingers. “Sight. Sound. Taste. Smell. Touch. We are just a bundle of perceptions. Anyone who tells you anything else is deluded.” He settled onto a box too.
“My father reads Hume. He says Hume helped lead mankind through all the feces that piled up under the rule of kings and bishops. He says now all we have to do is wipe ourselves clean, lick ourselves like cats. I like that idea, don’t you?” He stood up, grabbed his orange juice, sipped it, and then pretended to lick the top. It was unnerving and borderline creepy. He grinned and took two steps toward me, motioning that I get up. “Hummph,” he muttered, still swallowing, but now pointing. I hopped up, afraid I was breaking something or acting foolish. He had that effect on people. He hooked Hume’s heavy book and fished it out.
“Take it. Read the part about the slave to passions. Hume explains why there is no morality, only the mind. In a nutshell it’s all about choice, or the lack thereof.” He held the book up near his shoulder, wiggling it. “Our choices of right and wrong are not really choices at all, just the intellect following up on the flesh, mind to body, taking clues and hints from physical experiences and turning them into ‘right’ choices, or like I said once in class, navigable paths. Hume,” he said, as if eating a delectable treat, “was the first real philosopher. Without him there’s no modern science.” He stuck the book out and I got the urge to wag my head in disbelief. A little, scraggly nineteen-year-old hand dangled 200-year-old prose nonchalantly in my face, handing it over like the latest from Stephen King. I grabbed it, after all, who wouldn’t want to find out about “navigable paths” and the origins of modern science? Besides, Raphaella said something about philosophy and wanting to learn at the laundromat the day before.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said.
We both got up to begin the last of his move. Soon we would have his bed, his television and his couch in the apartment. The job complete, it was surely too early for a Guinness.
“Now we go get that beer.” Period. A done deal. Not too early. Like a serf I headed upstairs to tell Raphaella his plans. I met her in the hallway.
“He’s all moved in,” I said. “What time is it?”
“Around eleven I’d guess. Is he still around?” She peered over the banister looking toward Mitkin’s front door. “His father called and left a message.”
“He’s inside. His father called you?”
“Yeah.” She started down the stairs and around the banister toward the middle of the landing and Mitkin’s front door. I let her pass and followed her into Mitkin’s apartment. She tapped on the door before entering.
“Come on in, David, I’m ready to go,” yelled Mitkin from his bedroom. Raphie waited in the foyer, facing Mitkin’s room and waiting for him to emerge. He started out and immediately stopped.
“Raphaella?” He started again, this time a bit quicker. The whole scene made the ocean in me swell again. It just didn’t seem like two strangers greeting each other. Or did it? I kept an eagle’s eye on both of them.
“So this is what you look like? How many times have we spoken on the phone, three now? It is so good to finally meet you.” He walked so close I thought he would kiss her. And his voice changed. He now sounded nearly normal, not excruciatingly clever and ridiculously officious. Normal, like a man with a thick mustache or a guy waiting in line to buy a hotdog at a Mets game. Almost cool normal. Raphaella gave him a peck on the cheek. A tiny, airy sound escaped from my dropping jowls.
“Mitchell Mitkin, it’s nice to finally meet you, too. How you like this place?”
“You know I’ve seen it, Raphaella, it’s just I’ve never seen you in it.” He looked at her intensely, and there was a good deal to look at. She was beautiful. She stood straighter than he, and her posture made her seem just as tall. Her hair was thick and jet-black and cochlear, like a million ebony ropes. And it was long, past her shoulders long. Her skin was a burnished chestnut, her eyes emerald green. But more than anything—her lips. Underneath her Mediterranean nose, they rest like deep purple pillows, one on top of the other, but even, and pouty, and perfect. She was exotic, a woman of perfectly mixed blood.
“Show me the baby,” said Mitkin.
Raphaella lifted her T-shirt and the little bulge that was my baby availed itself. He touched it. I was dumbstruck. He touched it again. None of his touches were in any way sensual; everything he did with her belly was purely clinical and cold. Still, I thought, this is all far too familiar. He held one hand against her and tapped with the other. He used his thumb to push gently into the flank of her abdominal area. He acted as if he knew what he was doing and I know it seems unlikely, but he hypnotized me into complacency and obedience. He called me over.
“Now, David. Here,” he pointed to just below Raphaella’s pant-line and just above her groin area, “is the actual resting place of the child. As it grows this is the best place to listen for signs of life. It’s so perfect the way our bodies function. We are fine machines. Fine, fine machines.” He tapped twice on her stomach as he finished the sentence. Raphaella did not seem to care at all. She was always like this when it came to her body, she had progressive notions about sex and self, sometimes too progressive.
“Well Mitchell,” I said, “I say we get that beer. Let’s go. You buy.” I moved backwards as if to get everyone rolling in the same direction. “Shall we?”
Raphaella spoke up. “Wait Mitchell, your father called. He said to visit him before one. Says he’s got tests after one. He called about twenty minutes ago.” Mitkin seemed startled.
“Tests?”
“Yes.”
“Was he on the phone or a nurse?”
“It was him. He sounded fine. I hope I didn’t wait too long to tell you. Is everything all right?” Mitkin no longer seemed nervous.
“Yes, yes, no problem. It’s just that I was scheduled to visit him later this afternoon and Father never postpones or preempts anything. For him to change plans, well, he must have asked for some exploratory work.” Then he wondered aloud, “But if it’s a liver function test then…” He trailed off and came back again. “Anyway, no problem. I think I’ll skip the beer David. Later, that’s a promise.” I guessed that if it were a promise, it would undoubtedly happen. He darted back to his jumbled room and grabbed his running shoes and fanny pack. He tied his shoes in front of us.
“I’ll see you later. I’m running to the hospital, it’s faster. Plus, I’m getting a belly like yours, Raphaella. No good.” Of course, he had no belly, and it was hard to imagine any fat on this man, be it on his body or in his mind or as a part of his life. Everything was streamlined and ordered and pertinent. We stepped aside as he locked up while jogging in place. It was annoying. “I’ll bring back keys and a new lock for us all, no need to worry. Bye.”