Simon is a nearly silent, bespectacled garbage man. He lives with his mother, who is dying of some unnamed disease, and his sister, Fay. One day, they rent the basement to Henry Fool, who orders Simon to write what he can't say, and then encourages Simon to be a poet. See Henry Fool for clips.
Simon had never thought much about other people. About their faces. About their eyes. Well, that wasn't strictly true.He thought about them often, but never in relation to himself.
He never thought about what his sister's hair, hair that seemed like it had never seen a comb, meant to him. What his mother's sad, blank eyes said about his own colorless life.
He liked his job, he did. It was work; he could feel his body move, he could make some small, visible change in the world.
At home, nothing ever seemed any different. It was as still and artificial as a shop window's display. Fay's grooming was haphazard, but she was an eerily efficient housekeeper. His mother was forever on the couch, always in the same robe.
But sometimes he wanted to feel something, more than the motion of his own body, more than the spinning of the world. Which he could always sense, especially late at night in his barren bed.
He was sometimes gripped with a sort of detached panic, a fear that he was going numb, that he was dissolving like a melting popsicle, that he was invisible, that one day one of those young, pretty girls at the Deng's Deli would walk right through him.
And then one day, he reached down to feel the pulse of the world, his hand resting on the black, parched crust of the planet, and it was warm, sun warmed but throbbing like a mammal, and then he leaned down to rest his cheek against the asphalt skin of the world... and he realized that it wasn't a heartbeat... but the brisk rhythm of footsteps.
"Get up off your knees."
The first words ever spoken to him, it seemed. The first words Henry Fool ever said to him.
And Simon was dazed, light headed, and he could feel the heat roll off this man, and he obeyed.
Something compelling about his meaty shoulders, his intent glare, the sweep of his greasy hair. Simon wanted to touch that hair, to see if Henry was merely some kind of hallucination.
But Henry, if a force for epiphany and upheaval, was alive and breathing, solid flesh. An unshaven man in a suit without a tie. A man with all he owned in two brown leather satchels. A man who saw him, a man who spoke to him.
And it was as if all his life he'd been waiting to be seen; that the simple force of Henry's personality broke him open. Something chemical was happening.
Something was happening.
"Homonyms. Keep an eye out for them."
Simon didn't nod; he knew Henry knew he was listening. He could hardly help it.
"As outsiders we have more than perspective. We have X-Ray eyes... we see right through their petty contrivances. That's why we're dangerous. Reviled."
"I got another rejection letter today."
"Put it in the pile. One day, you'll be recognized and we'll set fire to your rejection. We'll build a goddamned bonfire right in the front yard."
"When can I read your confession?"
"When I've stopped committing reprehensible acts. We can't see the future, Simon, but I feel confident that it will be some time before my taste for civil disobedience wanes. Remember, I've done bad things."
"Repeatedly," Simon remembered.
"Exactly. You're still young, Simon. There's plenty of time to do things you can be ashamed of."
"I don't feel-- That is. I mean--"
Henry flicked ash from the tip of his cigarette.
"You're made for feeling. From the top of your head, all along your arms and legs. You feel things everywhere, and you feel so much, you worry you can't feel anything. You're not numb. You only lack focus. Drive. Conviction," Henry pronounced.
His sleeves were rolled up and his belt was unbuckled.
"Come here," he said suddenly.
Simon obeyed, as he had always obeyed, and Henry's strong, thick hand reached out and closed around his wrist, squeezing. As if he were trying to press some of his own manic energy into the reedy, solemn body that held the soul of Simon Grim.
"Fay loves you," he heard himself say, and Henry scowled.
"Was that what you wanted to say? How did you ever learn to write? You can barely finish a sentence on your own. Say what you feel, you codfish."
"I feel you," Simon said, and Henry made no move to release him. Haltingly, Simon continued. "I feel you all the time. Even when you're not upstairs, I can feel you... like a bass drum. And everywhere it smells like cigarettes, that's where you are. It's like... I breathed you in, the smoke is in my skull. Henry."
"Don't stop yet. You're not done."
"You don't know that."
"You're a poet. Poets never shut up. Listen to me."
"I can't talk and listen at the same time."
Henry squeezed his forearm again, and Simon could almost feel the bones grinding.
"Feel that," Henry said.
Without thinking, Simon brought up his free hand and touched the stubbled skin of Henry's jaw, with two fingers.
Henry responded by dropping his cigarette on the bare floor of the basement apartment, and covering Simon's dick with his rough palm.
"You never stop feeling. Stop feeling and you're dead, and this old bitch of a world will harry your rotting corpse."
Henry's breath was like a fog of cigarettes, as if entire casinos full of black lunged pensioners were exhaling their two packs a day somewhere inside of him.
"The world is full of shit, Simon. The world hurts. You can feel that, and if you ever stop, I swear I'll try to beat it back into you." He let Simon's wrist go and knotted his hand instead in Simon's almost blond, shaggy buzz. "I'm going to suck you." He took his hands back, and Simon felt unbalanced until Henry shoved him down in the sprung, split seamed recliner.
Henry knelt without hesitation and jerked the fly of Simon's jumpsuit down.
Then his hot mouth, a mouth that Simon suspected tasted like beer and... and cigarettes, and everything about you is greasy, as if you're sealed and slick so you can pass through the world without resistance... but that's not right, you want to leave holes in everything, in everything so people can find them and look through them and see the inside, the inside of the world, everyone's so tied to everything and you have a knife and you've been sawing through all those ropes, cutting all the lines and people are floating free and rising... rising... And you don't care that they'll be killed, that the sun is too strong, that the air is too thin and they'll hate you for it but we love you too, Henry, we love you almost as much as you love us. Henry. Henry Fool.
He came and Henry spat beside the recliner, leaning back on his heels to rub his jaw meditatively.
"You're going to break the world, Simon. They're gonna hate your guts. It's a masterpiece. And I'm just a fugitive. I got caught. I've been caught, and I'll get caught again, but you don't need speed, and you'd have slipped free on your own one day." Henry didn't smile, he never smiled, but there was a fondness in his eyes. "Fucking poets. Never shut up."
END
mail me
