Ralphie Peterson passed through the alley, the fetid odors oddly alluring, to Parish Street, to the front entrance. The door was closed. He leaned against the rickety steel railing, next to a big, warped rectangle of half-inch plywood. He touched its rough corner, the laminated layers swollen and damp from recent rain, and he remembered: his father and his brother laying it over the three cement steps, making a crude ramp so Ralphie could wheel down to the sidewalk, to the school bus. His father's red jowls jiggling, sweat beading on the top of his bald head, his knees popping as he bent. The fat man's ragged breathing as he lowered his end of the board into place.

He remembered, too: his brother Spinner's strong illustrated hands—ta—ttooed blue waves circling the right wrist, a bracelet of skulls and bones around the left—gripping the ramp's bottom edge. He remembered the hard gleam in Spinner's one good eye as those hands jerked the rough board—HA!—and his father's yip as the plywood lurched and splinters bit into his soft finger pads. His father's small, puzzled eyes, the astonished gape of his mouth. And he remembered himself, Ralphie, in his wheelchair, above the fat, shaken man. Dull and himself puzzled, sniggering—shhhhkk—because Spinner had sniggered.

Every day, the same routine: jerk—HA!—yip—shhhhkk Ralphie remembered, and his newborn soul ached.

Ah, geez.

Ralphie emerges renewed from golden fourarmed embrace; walks surelegged on cold white marble (HeShe is in this moment Muhammed trailing wives and verses); sweet swelling intricate music; sweet breath of a thousand lilies...

He sees now that he has not yet achieved Nirvana but is very close, perhaps one life, perhaps two; his soul knows no disappointment because nothing but joy lives here...

HeShe sprinkles verses from battlescarred fingers:

O Believer, you have this time accomplished much.

You conquered Catherine's fear of falling.

        (yes the window the grassless ground)

You atoned for Kim's arrogance.

        (yes dull slow a beat behind)

You purged Olga's gluttonous passion.

        (yes yes wheelchair tube bag deadworm penis)

You expunged Kumar's driving record.

        (yes yes yes no license)

But: work remains.

Ralphie sees: impatience, un-zen mind, reluctance to lie supine in the Taostream...

And what of my family, my karass?

Oink (HeShe is in this moment a small pink pig) oink oink oink.

She walked with trip-hammer heels, clack-clack-clack; Ralphie knew her before he saw her. Mother. He flew up the three cement steps, past the leaning memory-soaked plywood, to the door. He stood trembling, eyes taking in the unchanged details of her: rouge, slate-blue eye shadow, oily scarlet lips drawn with precision slightly beyond their margins. Blonde hair pulled into a tight french twist, sprayed, not a free wisp, not a dark root. A rail-thin, rail-straight body. Her suit—her beige Sell-A-House-Suit—two-button jacket, narrow skirt, smooth and sweatless in spite of the heat (polyester, he remembered, although he'd never known). Spiky-heeled shoes, exquisitely beige, flawlessly polished.

Mother.

Her brown leather handbag dangled from the crook of her elbow. Ralphie knew what was inside. This was a true memory: Ralphie at ten, fumbling the compact open with a powdery sneeze. The dazzle of the mirror. Tubes of lipstick that bled on his hands. The shiny little gun. She had picked it out of his lap and leveled it at him, at his hand gripping her mirror. "Ralphie," she had said, "Put every goddamned thing back in that purse RIGHT NOW, you fucking little retard, or the next time you buy gloves, you buy ONE." And he had put it all back, carefully. She had re-arranged it all in her own order, he remembered: gun on the bottom, kleenex, lipstick, keys; the compact—its mirror polished free of his fingerprints—on top. This, after he had done the job. As she always did, any time he had done any job. Any time his father, or his brother Spinner, had done any job.

Ah, mother.

Ralphie's heart filled with joy that hurt, too big for such a finite organ. Mother. He sat on the railing where it met the grey clapboard, his eyes bright but tearless, his heart overstuffed. And he watched her climb the cement steps—clack, clack, clack.

She gave him no notice, not a glance, as she retrieved the keys from her purse (the grip of each key, he remembered—and saw—was color-coded with a little plastic cover). She stuck one (it was blue-tipped) in the lock, turned the knob with a gloved hand (her cotton summer gloves) and pushed the heavy wooden door.

Ralphie followed her soundlessly, slipping up the stairs behind her, below her. His eyes followed her bony beige polyester hips, her swaying unwrinkled shoulders, her unswaying blonde hair. Her spiky beige heels clacked up the scuffed wooden steps, over the landing, up the second flight. The long third-floor hall smelled of urine and old tomato sauce, oddly enticing.

A red key; a gloved hand on the knob; a twist, and Ralphie was home.

Your family (HeShe is in this moment Queen Elizabeth the First, painted white virgin face, pointed jeweled finger). Your karass:

Ralphie's family glides through white marble arches in a silver bubble: fathermotherbrother

father: barehairychested, Pabst Blue Ribbon pregnant gut, face greenish with TV light,

mother: oily red lips, brilliant white slightly pointed teeth in her powdery dazzling mirror,

brother Spinner: behind Music Mania door, CD (Center Stage) tuptuping against buckknife in leather jacket pocket,

Ralphie speaks aloud (aloud allowed but not lauded because only joy lives here and joy is a soundless ray of perfect understanding):

Ah geez...

They're falling off the wheel...

Ralphie eased into the living room and perched on the sill of its only window. It was closed now, the pane clouded, streaked outside from rain and inside from (he remembered) his own hands, the only quick part of his previous self. He touched his nose to a glob of red hardness, a tiny jewel on the glass, and inhaled. Ah. Grape jam. The saliva rose in his mouth.

He turned back to the room.

Ralphie's father sat in his old sprung and cracked naugahyde recliner, his black-tufted chest bare, balancing a Pabst one-handed on his great paunch. His face flickered in the light from the TV; his mouth puckered in a benign and concentrated pout.

Ralphie's mother spread a kleenex on the small round table next to the front door. She nestled her brown leather purse down onto it. Ralphie closed his eyes and remembered the ritual: she would slide open the table's small drawer and pull out rubber gloves. Her home gloves. She would peel off her cotton gloves, pull on the springy yellow gauntlets. She would set her cotton gloves, neatly folded, in the drawer, and slide it closed.

Spinner was not here; Spinner (Ralphie remembered) seldom passed through the living room unless on his way to someplace else: the street, Music Mania, the bowling alley. His bedroom. He was there now, in his bedroom, Ralphie was certain; he could hear music pounding from Spinner's stereo.

Nothing had changed.

Even Ralphie's old wheelchair had not changed. It still sat next to the window. The clear plastic catheter bag still dangled from its seat. Ralphie moved close, brought his face down close. The little pool of urine inside was pale beige, the exact color of his mother's sell-a-house suit. He nudged the bag with a foot, touched the tubing: two loops, an open blue tip connected to nothing. It was exactly as he had left it (he remembered) that last day, after he had detached his catheter from it.

Ralphie had been connected to this bag for 23 years. He had lived bagless only until his second birthday. Then Spinner (He remembered: Spinner, five years older and possessed of two good eyes) had sailed him out, beneath the upraised, cracked pane of his bedroom window.

Then came the catheter. A succession of catheters, each bigger than the last. Then came the wheelchair. This wheelchair, not a succession. This very one—too big for him at two; too tight for him at 25.

Ralphie lowered himself lightly onto its seat. Now, the chair was big. Too big, because Ralphie was new, and no longer fat and clumsy and dull and one beat behind the world.

He watched his mother pull on her rubber gloves and shut the drawer. He watched her disappear into the tiny kitchen and reappear with a glittering economy-sized spray can of Lysol and a green plastic trash bag. He watched her gingerly pluck an empty pizza box—and another and another—from the floor. It was Monday (Ralphie remembered, his heart warm and soft); this was a Monday and Thursday rite, the Gathering of Trash for the Garbage Collecters.

He yearned to fly to his mother, to kiss that yellow rubber hand, to bury his face in that greasy cardboard. But she was quick; before he could move—TSZZZZT!—she had sprayed the box thoroughly with a choking cloud of Lysol and dropped it in her bag.

So Ralphie sat. He hummed softly—the theme from "All My Children"—and no one listened. He sat as he had sat for 23 of his 25 years. Unnoticed. Or nearly unnoticed, because sometimes (he remembered) the urine bag had overflowed, and sometimes he had had to take a shit, and sometimes (after the truant officers had insisted) he had had to be wheeled out, down the plywood ramp to the school bus. And three times a week, he had had to be bathed and Lysoled. Ralphie had been (he remembered, although he hadn't considered the issue at the time) little more than a problem in mechanics and logistics.

He scanned the room with his new bright eyes, and his mind blazed. His family. These flawed human beings were his. His karass; his companions on the Karmic wheel.

Ah, geez.

"Fucking PISSant," his mother said as she snatched up a beer can with deft yellow rubber fingers. She glared at Ralphie's father. "You're so shitfaced, you wouldn't know a trashcan from your ASS." She nabbed a second can, dropped it into the bag. "Why the Christless FUCK do I try? If it wasn't for little Spinny—"

"Now, now, Sweet Lips." Ralphie's father absently set his Pabst on his paunch; he snaked a fat pinky up his nostril, pulled it out, wiped it on the naugahyde chair arm. He narrowed his eyes at the TV. "'What is,'" he announced, "'The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari?'" A beat, then—"BINgo!!" He laughed victoriously—ha-HAH, ha-HAH. "Now, take History for five hundred! Yesyesyes—DO it! Awww!" He shook his head, jowls jiggling, beer can teetering precariously. "No. NO. ANYthing but Music!"

Ralphie's mother wheeled. "Don't you fucking DARE drop that motherfucking beer on this floor, you simpering dickwad!"

"Please, Sugar—Ah HAH!" He seized both arms of the chair; the can tumbled from his belly, sloshing foam into the tattered strings of a throw rug—"'What is Wozzeck??!?' Ha-HAH!!! Take THAT, Alex!!"

From the seat of his old wheelchair, Ralphie watched his mother grip a full can of Pabst in one yellow rubber hand. He felt weak, small, helpless. She wound up, let go—the impact, a dull thock, was not unlike the sound his head had made (he remembered this well) when it had hit the pavement on the last night of his life.

My karass. Ralphie Peterson flicked a glance at the closed window. I am here to bring you along on the wheel.

But geez—where do I start?

You will (HeShe is in this moment the Wizard of Oz) go back when you will; nine months, then years, and wisdom will come; perhaps zen mind; perhaps an effortless float in the Taostream.

The silver bubble bursts, reforms: Ralphie's father slumped, his liver a rank rotten cabbage, Ralphie's mother sterile under tented plastic (nurse asks: was she exposed to chemicals at work?), Ralphie's brother Spinner bound, roped to a cardoor in riverbottom muck.

Aloud:

let me tell them, let me warn them, let me lead them...

RalphieRuthKumarOngCatherineSalMoniqueChabullahLiOlgaKimStanley, I must advise you not to look behind the curtain.

No nine months, years, no time for wisdom, let me go NOW, let me...

let me remember this (glistening white marble; kiting Nirvana souls; lily aroma; swell of sweet intricate music; nothing but joy here),

so i can tell them, guide them, change their ways.

You can go back only in nature's time.

Please please please please...

Welllll. it is your life; there is a way: I can if you wish give you a faster body that does not violate nature's tender laws.

Oh thank you thank you and let me remember everything...

Highly irregular, but okay, memory, yes.

And let me be heard...

Heard or silent, yes.

And seen...

Seen or hidden, as you will, yes.

Oh thank you thank you thank...

How about a heart.

Beg pardon?

Or a brain or courage, since you're already (clickclickclick) going home.

Beg pardon, Your Perfect Allwise Androgenousness?

Hohohohoho.

Ralphie rose and slipped from the room, down the short hallway, through the half-open door to Spinner's bedroom. The air inside throbbed, thick with bass—ba-WAHMB, ba-WAHMB. His brother lay on his rumpled bed, which smelled, not unappealingly, of rank hair and feet.

Spinner's one good eye was riveted to a picture in a magazine. He gripped the faded, damp page in one hand. Ralphie peeked over his brother's shoulder. A smudged and beaming Helen Reddy, microphone clutched to her spangly bosom, waved up at him. Ralphie noted with new amazement the set of her eyes, her rail-thin, rail-stiff body. Had she cemented her hair into a french twist, she could have been his mother.

Geez.

Ralphie settled on a stool opposite the bed. His brother Spinner's right hand, the pageless hand, worked at the open zipper of his black jeans. Ralphie watched his brother's one good eye contract to a slit nearly as tight as the scar that marked the eye he had lost when he was 17. (Ralphie remembered: his father on the toilet seat, pizza-stained trousers around his ankles, staring up with puzzled eyes. Staring up the barrel of Spinner's birthday BB gun, to the wooden stock, into Spinner's two good, squinting eyes. The abrupt serendipitous dip of his father's head and shatter of pink tile; the ricochet of BBs. His mother's face—the horror!—the TSZZZT of Lysol in an oozing eye socket.)

Ralphie watched Spinner's slack lips harden in a rigid O; he watched Spinner's right hand move up, down, fast, faster, the spider web tattoo that covered his cheek and chin below the scar contracting, blue waves riding the bony wrist—

Music throbbed from the stereo: Helen, who could do ANYthing—

Spinner gritted his big, yellow teeth. The veins bulged on his pasty neck beneath the spiked leather collar.

Helen, who was STRONG (ba-WHAMB)—

So much to do.

And, yes, inVINcible—

There must be a way.

Spinner's neck arched; his left hand crushed the page.

Ralphie rose. He slipped out and back down the hall.

Ralphie's father held an unopened Pabst to his forehead. In the flickering TV light, Ralphie saw the beginnings of a large purplish bruise. "'What,'" said his father—he belched, his pregnant furry belly hitching—"'is Transvaal.'" He winced and popped the top of the can. "Ha-hah."

"Fucker," said his mother. "Christ-humping SHITbird."

Ralphie eased himself up to the little table where his mother's brown leather purse rested on its kleenex.

His brain reeled; so very, very much to do.

His brother Spinner stumbled into the living room, wiping illustrated hands on his black jeans. His mother sprayed the inside of her plastic trash bag once more with Lysol—TSZZZZZZT!—and fixed bright eyes on her elder son. "Where are you going, Spinny?"

Spinner's lower lip jutted, tugged a corner of the blue spider web down and to the left.

"You're going out, Spinny?"

Spinner dug a dirty fingernail through a hole in his black T-shirt ("The Ear Candy Tour," said the round pink letters) and scratched at the secret illustrated skin of his belly. The rings in his left ear (eighteen, Ralphie remembered) glinted in the dirty window's dying light.

Ralphie's mother lowered her eyes. "Oh, Spinny. Can't you be civil to your own mother?"

Spinner sneered, pulling his web to the right. He stomped to the window, the sole of one black combat boot landing squarely on the beer can his father had just dropped, crushing it. He unlocked the sash.

Ralphie watched his brother force the pane up (he remembered: His father goggling at "The Newlywed Game." His mother spraying the couch with Lysol. The soundtrack from "Pete's Dragon" pounding from his brother Spinner's stereo. Steering the wheelchair to the window, detaching the tube from his catheter, pulling himself up into the open gap with his hands, the only quick part of his previous self. Scraping his bulky upper body through the tight window frame. Aiming himself head-down toward the cement steps, sailing himself so, this time, he would get it right). His soul stirred uneasily.

There it was, the impatience; the un-zen mind. He had fought the lapping waters of the Tao stream.

"Now, Spinny," said his mother, "you KNOW we don't open that window—"

Ralphie's heart lurched. They had—closed the window in his memory??

He held his breath.

Here was hope; here, perhaps, a beginning—

"—because it is enTIREly too hard for me to get it down again when it rains."

Ralphie sighed. Ah. Well.

Spinner pinned her with his contemptuous one good eye.

A breeze, cool and disturbing, riffled the black fur on his father's chest. Ralphie's mother's eyes brimmed. She held out her plastic trash bag, filled, sprayed and sealed, like an offering in her yellow rubber hands. "Spinny, love, would you mind taking this out to the curb with you?" Her smile was tight, Reddy-esque. "Please?"

May I ask what I'm going back as?

You may ask (HeShe is in this moment a perfect replica of David Bowie in a bra and a Carol Channing wig) but, tsktsktsk, i don't have to tell ya.

Oh.

Hehehe.

Hmmm...

Tata for now; don't let the parade pass you by.

Spinner glared at the proffered bag with his one good eye. He turned away.

And Ralphie saw—

In a laser-flash, he saw them all. Really saw them.

All. A crystalline collage—faces, eyes, hands, gloves, beer cans, Alex Trebeck. He saw, with perfect kaleidoscopic clarity, his father drop an empty can on the tattered throw rug, detach another Pabst from its plastic ring, pop the top, take a gulp ("'Who was Harun al-Rashid!'" he said. "Ha-HAH! Show me the MONEY!"). He saw his mother sling her filled trash bag at his father's bald head ("You chicken-fucking PRICKlicker!" she said). He saw his brother Spinner slouch past him toward the door ("Shhhkk ," he said). He saw—

Epiphany—

that there was nothing he could do. Nothing.

Nothing! Each must pass through the wheel in his own good time. He saw it all, at last, with infinite love, with infinite wisdom, with a thousand bright, new eyes.

This was the zen mind.

He glowed with sudden humility.

This was how it felt to lie down in the stream.

He leaned his body on his mother's brown leather purse, spat reflexively on the porous surface, lowered his tongue to the now-moist bit of hide.

His mother glanced up from a chaos of shredded plastic and crumpled Lysol-soaked pizza boxes. She saw him. Really saw him.

Ralphie buzzed with perfect peace.

She heard him. Really heard him.

"Aaaaaaaaaah! Spinny," shrieked his mother. "Darling! Get that HORRID fly off mummy's purse!"

Spinner turned from the door; his one good eye followed her pointing yellow rubber finger. To Ralphie.

Spinner saw him.

Spinner raised his handth—e right one, blue waves tracking the tender skin of his inner wrist—

Ralphie's soul thrummed with empathy: how those needles must have hurt him. How this isolated, enigmatic man must have embraced the pain—

Spinner's hand descended.

Ralphie felt its warmth as it closed over him; he smelled its pungent (but oddly compelling) tang as it lifted him, brought him up toward the beloved blue-webbed face, the slack lips—

"What are you doing, Spinny!?" his mother said sharply. Then, "Spinner Peterson, NO—Don't you DARE put that FILTHY THING in your—"

Ralphie heard no more.

Darkness. A damp and fetid place; a great weight rushing down upon him. Pain: dull, almost friendly. Anticlimactic—

The tunnel explodes white, blinds and Ralphie sees (yes!)

© Susan O'Neill 2004