Chasing the Light

I was not much older than a boy. A runaway living in a third floor walkup in Hell’s Kitchen. Looking for whatever work I could find to pay the rent and keep my belly still. Morris was a last call shape up worker. Unreliable because of the three day drunks he sometimes went on after his son died and his wife left. But the city took him on in a pinch and then he convinced them it was a two man job. So they let him hire me, just a kid, on the cheap. Off the books. But the project manager made it clear. I was supposed to make him show up on time. The runaway babysitting the soul scarred drunk. Both of us trying to rewire those townhouses and ourselves before we were burned to the ground by the slow fire of a faulty connection or memory. Both of us trying to earn back the light we each had lost. “It’s all wired up wrong.” he said again and again. “All of it.” We spent that summer changing out substandard wires some low life contractor had used to wire up a line of refurbed shells in the Bronx. He greased an inspector six months from retirement to look the other way. A couple blocks burned. The contractor skipped and the insurance companies swallowed hard, paid the claims and upped the premiums to cover their end. Then they hired us. Figured it was cheaper to rewire them all then to let them slowly catch fire. One morning I had some of the wire we had torn out by hand. “This looks ok to me.” I said to Morris. “How do you know wire’s gone bad? He gazed at me for a long moment, bloodshot eyes and the kind of unwanted wisdom you pay for only with regret. He finally said- “Every bit of wire ever made is faulty, boy. All of it. Sometimes the current coming through is just stronger than the wire can stand. Above its tolerance. You cant really blame it.” Then holding up a handful of new shining coils and looking out over the city he shrugged. “Every one of them is flawed.” And running at night at the top of one of the avenues I would always see a few fires and hear his voice repeating to me about the flaws in the wiring of just about everything. There were times that summer when it seemed like the whole city was ablaze. But only underneath. Years before Morris had a wife he needed like air. It happens like that sometimes. The kind of love like you cannot remember what it is breathe before. Like every moment away is underwater, until you think your heart's lungs will burst. They had a son two years in. That just made all they felt stronger until they were inseparable. The way some couples become. When it's right. When it's true. One day the boy, just 7, ran out from his mothers arms on a Brooklyn stoop, chasing the sing song siren sound of an ice cream truck. He ran off the curb into the path of a bus. The driver, an old Hispanic man, had retired as a night watchman but when the SS check didn’t go far enough he hired on part time filling in for the MTA. His sight had started to go bad from working in the dark so long. Night vision. But he needed the money and managed to pass the tests. He never saw the boy until it was too late. He stood on the brakes, but the boy's body and soul disappeared under the wheels. Crying to himself, with bum knees and hips the driver hobbled off the bus. Seeing the motionless child, he collapsed in tears beside the boy’s broken body. The neighbors gathered at first in silence. It was that kind of quiet that unthinkable loss demands. But his mother threw herself next to the boy on her knees and let out a howl. It is an unmistakable sound. Grief. The sound of a heart being torn away from hope and left beating alone in some gutter. It is the kind of thing you can hear once and wake again and again in the dark to, like something that embeds itself into all you want to believe can never be. And once you hear it becomes a part of you. And though we all try, it remains.An i consolable wail at the very bottom of memory. The sound of her breaking open like that seemed to spark something in the quiet onlookers until a fuse was lit and outrage broke thru. It bent itself into a kind of hysteria then swept across the block. A suddenness took hold of these good people and in an instant they became a mob. They turned on the old man on his knees beside the boy, and trying to batter down the pain, dragged him away into an alley. The cops got there in time to save the old man. He was bloodied around his temple with a broken arm but another 5 minutes and the mob, trying to beat heartbreak away, would have splintered his skull. “No …no ….,” the old man cried out as the police pushed them back. “Let them finish. Let them finish.” “Ah he’s nuts,” one cop said. The other looked from the boy’s body to the old man, bloodied and overcome by grief, then stared at the gutter wondering why they were forced to witness the same varied heartache day after day for civil servant pay. The old man was shaken, cut and bruised but broken too in the way a man can sometimes become. But the worst of it, the wound of his conscience, deepened. The boy's body was collected and his mother, inconsolable and howling like a wounded animal, finally let herself be dragged away. One EMS drew a chalk mark on the pavement, then threw saw dust to cover the spot. And the people of the block tried not to look at the outline in white waiting like a ghost on the blacktop. The next day it rained and the sawdust and chalk washed away. And later that week the traffic and life resumed once more rolling down the street over the spot now left only to a mother's heart and the past. But the street seemed darker now. It was as though the world and everything in it had been caught in some unexpected eclipse that no one talked about but everyone seemed to feel. The old man had his arm set but in some other way remained broken. He returned to his flat and sat alone in the dark staring into his bruised faced and looking at his shaking hands. He quit the next day. But, drunk for a few weeks in the middle of every night, he would hobble to the spot, fall to his knees and howl up to the darkened tenement windows, “Forgive me…forgive me!” Early one morning a man shaken from his sleep cursed under his breathe, slipped from his bed and hollered out the open window. “Go on ya, crazy old man. People gotta work. Shut the hell up.” The old man, silent for a moment like he was sure God was finally listening, cried out again pleading. “Forgive me?” His voice broke and as it fell away the man’s his wife stepped behind her husband. She recognized the bus driver but something else, something more in the keening pitch of his voice. She pulled at her husband's arm and he shrugged and went back to bed. The wife stood for a moment touched by pity, blessed herself and closed the window. And the bus driver unabsolved, wandered away into the dark. Life changed for Morris of course. But worse something changed in his wife. Something that Morris for all his own heartache and love for her, could not reach or repair. Though her mind was clear, her heart was touched by a common form of madness. From the endless echo of grief. Even after she went silent no amount of love from her husband could quiet it. She tried to force it down and away. But as often happens all feeling in her followed. Love, so often a healer, was so badly fractured that its jagged pieces now only had the power to cut. And her heart, suddenly wired wrong and walled off from all feeling, became a darkened place. In fear of what the world might demand it endure again. And though Morris did all he could think of to save what was between them, the light was gone from her eyes. “It’s all wired up wrong.” he told me again and again that summer. "All of it.” She left early one dawn as he slept. Determined to outrun the shadow of her own pain. That is a common remedy that almost always fails. Asking a mother's heart not to grieve is like asking the wind not to blow or the earth to be dirty. Heartache is faster than feet or buses or trains. It is faster than the speed of light. And it always will be. One day in the early autumn Mo was a no show. His boss came by mid morning and told me to go see if I could light a fire under him. By the time I reached his flat there was a crowd around his door. Worried I pushed past the lookers into the kitchen where the cops were arguing. “I wrote up the last one. This is two hours on a desk." “Shut up,” his sergeant said. Just shut up for God’s sake.The world needs to know the how and where and why of a life. We need our reports to flatten the truth into agate type and bury it in some page 38 obit. We have to tell the world that there is one less of us trying to reach some unreachable light. That one more heart shorted out from some current that was stronger than it could carry. So the next day the police blotter described the son of sanitation man that had taught himself electric work. A scraper that had a runoff wife somewhere in Alabama and son buried in Woodlawn that he would be laid next to. It would say he had been distraught. The report would not mention the wire he used to try to suspend himself above memory. Or the light was he trying to repair in himself. Every bit of wire is flawed. All of it. Sometimes the current is too strong. Above our tolerance. And we are forced to carry something stronger than any heart was ever meant to bear. WLM