Forgive Me

Who Am I?

You might as well take me now, dear poppies. I will never again harm an innocent man-- not at gunpoint and certainly not now.

-2/21/1920

The train whistle infected the air with illness. You could smell it in the passenger carts seeping off yellow skin and still eyes. Not a sunny yellow, but a fleshy yellow, like the underbelly of a decapitated hog. And dribbling down the car rugs into the flasks of rotting hands.

I sat at an isolated meal booth in the center of the cart, where I am certain no one would install one, but it all seemed perfectly normal in the dream. My hand was on a window across the room and twiddling with feigned uncertainty.

It wasn't real-- it couldn't be real! Not the booth, not the train, and certainly not that hand. That hand belonged to a mannequin-- a pale, sickly mannequin stained the color of raw pork. And the corpses, though wriggling with maggots, were creating a buzz of conversation and raising mugs to lips, as if possessed! Was the train even moving or was the ground?

"Won't you look at that view?" Father said from across the booth, acting so casual I was led to believe he could not see the living dead.

But neither could I, because I answered as sweet as a pastry, "Magnificent."

Only, it wasn't magnificent, not even close. The storm, it seemed, had transcended my subconscious and reappeared outside the impossible window. The train hovered without tracks over the murderous cliffs and swerved to avoid the sheer drop. The sky was bleeding but never touching the horizon.

"Do you ever wonder who killed her?" June said. She had replaced Father across from me and struggled to keep her chin above the table.

"Not a bit," I lied, and the train melted away. Now we were in the immigrant ship, stuck to Italy and unmoving.

"Who would be so angry to wrap her in wire and leave?"

"Or grieved."

"Ah, so you have thought it through."

I eyed the sea, moaning like a vat of souls and tugging at the boat with all its might. We were stuck to the land like a limp twin attached at the hip, and basking in the cries of explosions echoing over the building.

"Mussolini! Mussolini!" Italy shrieked and more cauliflower-explosions ripped through the thread of the sky in the name of the National Fascist Party.

Something about Bolsheviks, I think.

"How old are you?" I asked June.

She smiled and said, "Two and three quarters, Mama."

"You do not sound it."

"Whatcha mean?"

"You sound like pine needles."

"This is where we met, remember?" June was suddenly Lars, sitting cross-legged on the gate. "You asked me why."

"Why what?"

"Why there were bandages on my belly."

"I never asked that."

The sky unfurled like a damp raincoat and stained a bruise color.

Lars c****d his head and it leaned far too long, hanging from a strip of skin binding his neck and chin. "How could you have forgotten? I thought the answer was at least worth a memory."

"You never had bandages," I snapped, though I knew he was right. The stained bandages. The groan when he bent over.

The fear of fire.

"And I said, 'Le bombe', remember? Le bombe took my stomach off. Le bombe is why I'm leaving."

"The bombs."

"The bombs!" He fiddled with the strip holding his bandages together, twiddling it between a thumb and forefinger. It snaked around him like chains, but with itchy eyes and bared teeth. "And you tell me your head is drilled with le bombe. You tell me reality is just as plausible as fantasy."

"No."

"No?!"

"I said I burned."

The bandages were piking at his feet, now-- unraveling to his knees and below his ankles-- and dripping like a skewered lamb above a roasting fire.

"How much more death must you inflict before he realizes you're mad?" he wondered.

"I am not mad."

"Oh right, I forgot you called it desperate."

"Abigail was starving, Lars, you were starving!"

"Really?" His chest was beginning to show, or whatever was left of it. From underneath, something throbbed. "Was I starving?"

"You told me you didn't have enough."

"But?"

The gears beneath my scalp whistled and gooey steam billowed out from the water. The Mussolini supporters were long gone, replaced by a knowing silence that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle.

"But I could no longer see your spine," I whispered. "You were meatier than I had ever seen you."

"Tell me," he smirked, the glossy red of a hollow stomach coming into view with every strip he removed, "where do I work?"

"You pin advertisements to apartment doors. You came home so frozen you collapsed on the porch."

"How many advertisements do you see daily, Missy?"

"None."

"And how many days do you go around those complexes?"

"Every- but I stay away from the inner city! You could work there!"

"If you couldn't get a job there, certainly I, with so much Italian on my tongue I might as well be speaking it, wouldn't have a chance!"

The last of his bandages fell away and I stared into his bare stomach with my jaw hanging open, biting my tongue so hard I tasted blood.

It was gaping-- the edges of his flesh charred and crumbling like cooled magma-- and wearing the contents of his torso with sick, yellow pride. His heart was pulsing and dripping blood from severed veins. It was coated with infection, seeming more like the contents of a grapefruit than a vital organ. The twin lungs collapsed in and out of themselves, sucking in air from broken, shrieking tubes. The strings of intestines spilled out his body and hung like flesh worms over his groin, coughing up vomit and forcing it down again.

"How much do you really know about me, Missy?" he asked, his shattered ribs squelching with pus from burned blisters.

"You are an object," I said without taking my eyes off the mess in his stomach. "You are not real."

"Am I just as inhuman as the stranger outside the club? Am I worth less than financial aid?"

"You are not real!" I shouted, digging my fingernails through my scalp. "You never were!"

"How do you know I didn't leave the message in June's bonnet? How do you know I wasn't the voice in the shadows?"

"Stop it! You're not him! You're not Lars!"

"Then who am I, Missy?"

His face-- no, its face-- flickered like a candle wick and bled a thousand different people: David, Marcus, Abigail, June, Jesse, Gregory, Becky, Robin, Hampton, Father, the woman in the dirt, the men under the trees, the protester on the crate, the woman at the gloomy cafe. Everyone mixed like melted crayons on the head of the dripping stomach and I screamed.

Screamed and screamed and screamed

* * * * *

It was a gift to stroll down the city that Saturday afternoon: before the rush to leave work began and if flooded with a surge of clacking heels. In the months I had perused the untamed jungle of East Boston, there had never been such a mindful experience as this. I swallowed the many aromas: the pies, the shoe polish, the window cleaner. The sun poked its head out from behind creamy clouds and stained the bright, unavoidable blue a pink, like the inner rings of a snail's shell. The contrast capped the buildings with powdered sugar and caked cinnamon and began to look more like cakes than the bricks in the shop windows. In the distance, a cargo train whistled and somebody swooned, I swear, and dipped in the arms of a spy.

June's hand-- thin fingers and a palm folded underneath my own-- felt wonderful in mine. It was radiating warmth and relaxed, allowed to dangle like a chandelier. My thumb rubbing against her pale skin, feeling the thump of her heart in her wrist. It felt better than the cold pearls on my collarbone.

Much better.

She was polka-dotted that day-- red and white like a cheerful housewife. Her bonnet loosely kept the sea of black locks billowing down her head, but neither of us minded. Beauty isn't something pristine and pinched but relaxed and genuine. Beauty isn't a plastic plant but a lily, growing against all odds and beaming.

"Mama?" my daughter asked, and I winced at the memory of her in the train, sounding more like an old woman than a child. "What will the doctor do?"

"He will look at your eyes," I explained. "and see if he can fix them."

"What's wrong with my eyes, Mama?"

"They don't work as well as they should. If the doctor finds what's wrong, they can start acting normal."

She bit the end of a pink lip and her eyes traveled to a resting place, where there was only gray. "Will you be with me?" she finally said.

I shook my head. "Mama has to run an errand. Then she will be back for you, lickety split. You won't even realize I've gone!"

The fragile hand tightened its grip on mine and I did likewise, not to give her security (though it may have done so) but to remind her she was still beside me. The prospect of leaving my June-- MY June-- alone with a stranger clawed at the bars I kept it behind. I did not want to allow it access to a forest of anxious pines and abandon the idea of getting her help if it meant I wasn't there. But this was selfish of me. If leaving her for less than half an hour meant a lifetime of care she needed, lest it worsen, I would grit my teeth, tense my shoulders, and give in.

A lady with blisters and bit fingernails greeted us, but I couldn't tell you how. I felt like a rock-- those mini boulders kept at the window because they don't lock. A rock you couldn't skip if you tried: heavy and square. The lady with the blisters said something, after choking twice trying to say "Begum", and smiled. Whatever she had said was hovering above my ear but not entering; she sounded like she inhaled salt water.

"Fifteen," I said to June, placing my lips on her forehead and watching the worry on her cheeks melt into pleasure. "Fifteen and I'll be back for you. Can you do that?"

Can I do that?

Without waiting for an answer, I waved her and the woman farewell, ignoring the feeling in my legs draining, and began my stroll toward the police station. It was an afternoon of Spring in late February-- the kind of day you enjoyed because it wouldn't be back. At least not until Summer won the battle against the vicious Winter Wind. Snapdragons popped like golden kernels from underneath horse tracks. They were sickly colors-- not sunny yellow or cherry red like in Italy but warty, like if you pressed into it with the tip of your thumb, you would find hair growing underneath your gums. The clouds were thin and wispy, braided into the sky like hair-- like June's hair.

Stop thinking. Stop. Move your legs and leave. Fifteen. Fifteen. You can leave her with someone possibly untrustworthy for fifteen. Right? Right.

The police station was one of the easier buildings to locate because of the crest. It was once silver, I think, but it was now bronze. Rusty, smelly bronze. It hung over the sign (which was just as bland as everything around it) and teetered on one of the four corners. Nails had sat there for so long, they had managed to stick like raw concrete inside the wall. If you touched them, their frozen heads would burn you.

I had never been inside the police station and assumed only the worst. Not of the building but of the men. I liked to believe David would never act like other men-- like the savage beasts dangling their testicles in front of my face-- but I could not know of his coworkers. Would they aid me in an audience with their detective? Laugh and turn me away? Ask an erotic favor before they gave me any help? I did not know, I could not know! It took the beauty from the day, not knowing, and wracked my skin with shivers.

Feel the fear. Feel that worry ripping you apart. And do it.

The doors squeaked when I turned the handle and a breath of cold, intense air shoved its way beyond the station. It was freezing , but not in the way a sudden mouthful of snow is; it was more like a dispassionate cold: something you avoided or feared. The floor was checkered the color of photographs and uneven. Had I been wearing heels, they would not manage a stroll without sticking.

There was the front desk, bordering a rose-patterned divider and too long for the single man at his post. he, like I, was surrounded by those dividers, so as to conceal the gears of their operation from curious eyes. Did he know what those shadows were? Could he spill a lifetime of unjust secrets? Just a boy?

His chin jiggled as I approached and he scrambled to hunch his posture. "Good day," I greeted, amused with his timidity and chin. You rarely found well-fed commuters around these parts. How must it feel to eat so much you expand, I wonder?

"G'day, ma'am," he replied, surprisingly smooth. "What can the Boston Police Department do for ya this afternoon?"

"I was a witness of the Rim case, Missy Begum, that was investigated five days ago. I wish to speak with your detective: the man on the case."

"'fraid you'll have to speak with an auxiliary. Can't have the man off-"

The divider to my left swung open with such a bang the receptionist yelped and ducked beneath his desk. From behind the gate, there emerged two men: one I recognized and one I did not.

Gregory Kingsbury-- a decorated man with just about as many buttons as flirtatious comments and chief of his task force-- sauntered his way to the front desk with a limp in his left foot and a grumble on his lips. The other man was immediately recognizable by the curls of red hair billowing out from underneath a plaid cap. His walk was bouncy and his grin lax, but it dripped like a broken faucet. Everything about him seemed to melt and twist and shake but in a way that suggested he was neither liquid nor gas but gelatin. He was certainly a lean man, built with a lifetime of chases through rocky tunnels, but his words took a fleshy shape.

"Miss Begum!" Gregory exclaimed with his palms facing outward and the bruises kissing his throat. "What might bring that lovely face 'round these parts?"

"Chief Kingsbury, I need to speak with your detective. I believe to have forgotten a key detail in the case I wish to address."

The orderly at the desk opened a bagel mouth wide, realized it was his boss there, and shut it.

"Well, you're in luck! Here's the man now!"

I c****d my head to one side and raised an eyebrow. "Holly isn't here, sir."

"Holly isn't on the Rim case, my dear, McKinley is." he gestured to the man with the ginger hair who twiddled a few fingers in my direction.

"Hallo," he said. "You sound Greek."

"Italian," I corrected and turned my attention back to Gregory, glad to be ignoring the new face. "Well, where has Holly gone?"

"Home. Rim was his best friend and the detained suspect another. I approved his leave; the man deserves his rest. Why not meet with McKinley instead? He's just as capable as Holly to fill out an incident witness statement form!"

I don't need to fill out a form, I thought in such red annoyance I feared he might hear. I need to speak with David.

But I said, "Fine," and it was all I could do. What sort of witness withholds new evidence because the detective is a different person?

Then again, what sort of witness makes up a story so she can see the detective? I was stuck in a lie.

"Let's step into my office," McKinely offered, opening another section of the dividers with a tiny, golden key.

I took my way through the open door, searching for another miraculous lie in my forest, and gazed into the enclosed world that was his "office". It was the size of a standard bathtub and almost as empty. A single chair-- the foldup kind with just about as much support as a hot pretzel-- sat against the wall while piles of unopened boxes were littered about it. There were no windows and a chain from an exposed light-bulb dangled from the ceiling.

"Apologies for the mess," he said, suddenly sounding more formal than he had from outside the door. "I've barely moved offices. used to be in a cubicle next to the temporary cells. Asked to be moved after this guy took a piss through the bars."

I laughed. His good cop facade was effective-- so effective I almost wanted to believe him.

McKinley drew up a stack of three boxes and sat where he balanced. he then gestured to the foldup chair which I gladly took over the cardboard.

"Let's hear it, Miss Begum. You're a prime witness in this case; any further evidence you have brings us closer to apprehending whoever committed this terrible crime."

The image of Mrs. Rim's twisted, bloody body roared like thunder in my ears and I found it difficult to come up with another lie. Something so horrific deserved serious evidence, not my fibs to cover up a worry.

"McKinley, I want to be honest with you," I sighed.

He tilted his head to one side and chuckled. "Miss, you have no new evidence for me. It's written all over your face. You came here because you were worried about Detective Holly, yeah?"

I exhaled my relief and nodded. "He will not answer the door, sir. I didn't know where else to go."

"That man is fortunate to have so many people worried about him."

"Why, who else has sought him out?"

"That little reporter that follows him around? He was in here not even an hour ago looking for him. Was damn ticked, too. Frantic. Came in screaming something about poppies."

The warmth of the room drained like rain water in a sewer grate and my heart jumped to my throat. Without saying another word, I was out the door to McKinley's office and running down the tired Boston street.