Desdemona, Tag Cavello [classic literature list TXT] 📗

manifestation of what’s probably the worst disease a living being can get. Electrical impulses from the brain become blocked, rendering the body’s limbs without proper command from their control center. Everything begins to twitch violently. Or, as in the case with grand mal, the victim may actually pitch himself back and forth across a room, banging his head against walls, falling down stairs. He literally has no control of his body until the seizure stops.”

Dante knew what seizures were. Two years ago a boy in his fifth grade class had suffered one during lunch hour, falling backward out of his seat to crack his head on the cafeteria floor. It had looked and sounded horrible. No animal cooked alive on a spit could have appeared more grotesque, or with its breaking skull ‘neath the hammer of a cruel master created worse music.

“So his brain was damaged?” he asked Donati.

The opera singer’s answer surprised him. “Not physically,” he said. “After three more attacks, the boy’s terrible father finally took him to a hospital, where doctors could find nothing wrong. And indeed, even the boy did not think he was sick. He was convinced an entity from another realm wished him harm. A tall, angry man with an unkempt black beard.”

Lost in utter confusion by these words, Dante shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

“A ghost, dear boy, a ghost. The boy told anyone who would listen, including his doctors, that he was being attacked by a ghost.”

“So he was insane.”

Donati laughed. “Oh, Dante. How like a common man you can stumble to be. How like a non-believer.”

“I bet his doctors thought the same thing. The dad too.”

“As a matter of fact they did. But the attacks continued, always in the middle of the night, rousing the poor boy from sleep, never during the day. This confounded the doctors even more, for seizures do not pick and choose by the moon. Before long the boy began describing his attacker in more detail. He was a tall, wide man with black hair and a black beard. He always wore a red and black checkered shirt with blue jeans and heavy black boots. And often, as he beat on the boy, he would speak.”

As if to contradict this latter fact, Donati stopped talking. His eyes dropped to the gooey ice cream, which must have maintained its appeal, for in the next moment he retrieved a spoonful and lifted it to his mouth. All Dante could do was wait. He wanted to know what the ghost said, what fury it vocalized from the other side. Was it the secret of death? Or a portrait perhaps, painted with fierce syllables, of God himself?

Donati looked up and smiled. “Emronoh,” he said.

This confused Dante even further. “I’m sorry?”

“You wish to know what the entity said. Or rather what it shrieked as it beat the boy in his own bedroom. I can see it plainly in your eyes. It said emronoh. Over and over. Emronoh, emronoh.”

“I have never heard that word before in my life.”

“Nor had the boy. But the entity would bellow it in a rage, its eyes on fire, the blackness of its beard thick and wild, as if grown out by something from deep in the woods. The boy repeated the word to his father. By then the man wanted to hear no more. He thought his son was playing tricks to get out of his chores. He made the boy work anyway, beating him like always. And yes, his mother continued to serve him gruel. Foul slops with dirty water. That was his family. That was his life. Hounded by day, haunted by night.”

Dante found he could picture with terrible ease everything the opera singer said. It hurt his heart. “Why, Mr. Donati?” he pleaded. “Why?”

The other stared over the table with wide eyes. “But my dear boy, I’ve already told you. He was ugly and stupid. Useless.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Ah.”

“Where is this boy today? Is he still alive?”

The laugh these questions brought forth was sarcastic. More like the snort of a pig. “Still alive, yes. Surprising eh? Though certainly no longer a boy. He eventually grew into a tall man with a black beard, who often dresses in heavy checkered shirts and blue denim pants.”

“How do you know how he dresses? You’ve met him?”

“Never.”

“So what,” Dante asked, carefully as he could, “is the significance of his clothes?”

It seemed to irritate his friend. The spoon clanged as Donati dropped it to the plate. The opera singer rose, cleared the table, and carried everything to the kitchen. “Perhaps,” he called over a flow of water from the sink, “there is no significance. Perhaps I added it for my own amusement. What do you think, boy?”

“I think it has significance. But then I already said as much.”

Another clang, this one louder, though Donati was further away. “You’re being clever and foolish at the same time,” he called. “Is this yet another trait derived from trysts with that strange girl?”

“I don’t know,” Dante admitted. “Maybe.”

“What does Sunny mean to you, Dante? Can you tell me that?”

The water stopped. More clanging—lighter, musical—floated into the room. Donati was putting the dishes away.

“Strange isn’t how I would describe her,” Dante said, peering into the fire. “She’s more like a knife. A very sharp knife with no one to hold the handle.” He shrugged. “Well. Now there’s me.”

Donati came back into the room and sat down. Dante looked over the table at a man concerned as one might be for his own son.

“Are you truly willing to do that?” the singer wanted to know. “Take the handle, and cut?”

“Tell me why you mentioned the boy’s clothes. Please.”

“Had you been listening more intently you would already know. His clothes, as a man, often match the ones worn by his childhood attacker. The ghost with the beard—the beard that looked remarkably like the one this man wears today.”

“Are you saying they are the same being? The ghost and the boy?”

But if Dante hadn’t been listening intently before, it was Donati who seemed detached now. “In his middle teens the boy decided to shrug off the hatred,” he said. “All of it. From outside and in. No matter how cruelly the world treated him, he decided never to be cruel with himself ever again. It was wise. Almost immediately the ghost stopped coming. The attacks stopped. The boy let go his fear of the dark, his fear of sleep. He rose every morning, did his chores, and went to school. He spoke softly and patiently to everyone he met. He made sure to exhibit kindness, thoughtfulness. He was helpful of others. Truthful. Trustworthy. This was inevitable. Respect for himself radiated. Shined like heat from the sun, warming all it touched. During that year his grades at school went up. His father stopped beating him. His mother began serving him proper meals. Everything changed.”

“Change,” Dante intoned, “is always change for the worse.”

“Stop that,” the other huffed, scowling. “It isn’t true. Change is sometimes necessary. It certainly was in the boy’s case. He grew into a strong, productive man. A farmer like his father.”

“It sounds to me like he lay down and let the world walk on him, Mr. Donati. And hey…everyone loves a doormat.”

“He recognized,” Donati said patiently, “that a mess on the table cannot be cleaned by a foul rag. Would you care to know what the word meant? The one the ghost kept screaming in the dead of night?”

“Yes,” Dante nodded. “Please.”

“In his late teens the boy was playing guitar with a little folk band he’d put together. He remembered the word, emronoh, and thought to make it the title of a song. His band-mate heard the song and liked it. Then one night, just for fun, they played it backward. A lot of gibberish blared from the speakers of course, until it came to the title, when emronoh came out as honor me.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Love Rhymes

False words of love from perspective disabled must snap the wrong way off one’s crooked table.

 

Dante had no idea what to buy Sunny for Christmas. He spent early December walking the streets of downtown Norwalk with hope in his heart that something—anything—in the lit windows of cotton snow and sparkle frost would catch his eye. No such luck. Main Street commerce was dying a slow, cruel death at the hands of several new department stores which had recently opened in Sandusky. Hair whipping in a stiff breeze, Dante stopped in front of a clothing outlet. The garments on display looked scruffy, outdated. A Santa Claus with crooked eyes leaned drunkenly on the glass. Dante crossed the street and doubled back the way he came. He crossed Benedict Avenue (where a paper bell decoration, flying on the wind, nearly took off his head). The Glass Block Building, site of the famous boiler explosion Donati had once told him about, stood on the corner. Passing it with nary a glance, Dante ducked inside of a flower shop. His fingers were crossed. Perhaps here he would find help. Salvation.

“Get out,” a short, fat woman said from behind the counter. “We don’t allow kids in here.”

Dante took out his wallet and showed her three twenty-dollar bills. “Too bad,” he said. “Guess I’ll go to Henry’s Flowers instead.”

But he didn’t go to Henry’s, which was two blocks away to the northeast. Any flowers he bought for Sunny would likely be dead by Christmas anyway. He needed something else. Something simple and eloquent that defined her.

“Something out of town,” Dante said to himself, fetching a deep sigh.

Later that week he asked his mother for a ride to Sandusky Mall. Doubtless needing to get a little elf work done herself, she agreed. They left Norwalk at nine-thirty and arrived at ten to a mass of other early birds waiting for the main doors to open. Dante’s eyes jumped from face to face. Most were female but not all. No one looked especially drunk on holiday cheer.

“Hey Mom,” he said, “if you were a twelve year-old girl, what would you want for Christmas?”

“I don’t know,” came her uninterested reply. She looked at her watch, then the doors, then her watch again.

“I’m kind of stuck for an idea.”

“Oh. Yeah, okay.”

“Thanks for caring, Mom.”

“Anytime, sweetheart.”

The doors were unlocked at 10:06. Dante and his mother moved forward with the rest of the herd. They passed a video arcade, a restaurant, and a bingo parlor before reaching the mall’s main midway, where the drowned wishes of a three-tiered water fountain dampened his spirits even further. After instructing him to meet her back at the fountain at noon, his mother went left, vanishing behind a Timex kiosk. Dante took a seat on the basin. Wandering about from store to store had already proven a bad idea. He needed to think. Formulate. Perhaps even pray.

Two giggling girls, both about Sunny’s age, approached the fountain and turned right. Slim, stylish bags hung on their shoulders. Dante wondered if there were credit cards in them.

Perhaps you should find out, a reasoning thought told him.

He followed them (casually, keeping a safe distance) to a pink and red cosmetics store that looked nothing at all like a place Sunny would shop. Paper hearts were taped in the window. Teddy bears hung from the ceiling. No, Sunny would never shop here. Maris, definitely, but never Sunny. Sunny would strut right past the entrance without even turning her head.

Dante went inside. He browsed the aisles, which didn’t take long. It was a small, cozy store. A saleslady smiled at him but didn’t quite dare ask if he needed help.

Buy her a Teddy bear, a desperate thought ventured.

Oh yeah, came the reasoning one’s response, good idea. She’ll probably slaughter it with a butcher knife in her basement.

“Shut up, both of you,” Dante muttered.

Then he saw the nail polish rack. It was one of those narrow plastic towers that rotated. Suddenly inspired, he crossed to it and gave its bearings a spin. More bright red appeared.