CONSTANT EXPOSURE to the elements without the option or luxury of shelter is thought to cause one’s physical and mental well-being to deteriorate. Nineteenth-century Mountain men were known for having grand delusions such as feuds with neighbors who were never there or even visions of grizzlies tearing them to pieces while they slept. Such is the case with Humphrey Catskill, except this individual’s undoing takes place in the present day. And instead of roaming the snowcapped Rockies bridged by deep, open valleys exuding a terrifying silence, he skulks in barren loneliness amid a constant rumble (of car horns, dress-shoe waddles, stiletto clicks, cross-trainer thuds, phone conversations conducted too loudly, and the slice of automatic doors leading to fast-fashion retailers), surrounded by a looming colonnade of apartment buildings, all in a city subject to the deep-boned chill of Connecticut winters. In short, he is homeless, a vagrant—unfavorably speaking, a bum—where in this cold city the elements will, to some degree, contribute to the worst evening of this man’s life. Humphrey’s days are spent on park benches, and his nights spent sleeping behind manicured hedgerows. During the winter, he lies under vents tucked behind high-end restaurants that eject hot steam smelling of soggy meat in the dark corners of back alleys. In addition, he finds himself subject to frequent visions this city triggers in him; visions that may be predicated on his own experience—or not—leading him to drift in a mobile pool of spittle and urine, reliving drunken delusions of a past potentially never lived and reimagined in a series of transitory moments he cannot escape, nor can he confirm their reality.
Therefore, not only is he forgotten, but he has essentially forgotten any of the lives he might have affected, damaged, improved, saved, and what remains are mere fragments of a life or lack thereof. Hence, he is left to curl up and sleep in the miserable backstreets shimmering with ice-glazed asphalt, giving this city that cages him a distinct grayness to match the gray limbo of his existence.
If one were fortunate enough, or better yet, if they were sympathetic enough to even fancy the notion of this man’s plight prior to this evening, they wouldn’t be surprised to see Humphrey coming around a corner asking for a cigarette or spare change. But such a simplistic exchange will not occur in the dead-end alley of the Avon Cinema, a vintage movie theater where the aforementioned dead-end connects to a pre-Depression apartment complex where we find a barfly currently urinating on the wall—the very person Humphrey will approach, catalyzing not only Mr. Catskill’s undoing but also this barfly’s grievous injuries. On a positive note, no one dies tonight.
***
Humphrey wanders the streets because that’s all he can do. Soon, he comes upon this young man relieving himself, humming to a tune playing inside the bar. Normally, Catskill would walk by and give a snide comment, but tonight he feels a familiarity when looking at this person. Maybe because this gentleman looks to be around the same age as Humphrey’s son, although he hasn’t a clue what his son looks like anymore. It’s been years, and while he wouldn’t like to admit it, he knows he is the one to blame for being so estranged from his family. He feels the guilt running through him like a heartbeat, a constant reminder of his negligence.
He wants to say to the barfly that he reminds him of someone, but all he can bring himself to do is ask for a cigarette to keep warm in the snowfall. The local shelter won’t take him in because of a recent manic episode that resulted in a thrown chair during an altercation with a nineteen-year-old runaway. It happened during group when a visibly hungover Catskill kept muttering obscenities under his breath in reaction to the runaway’s monologue about his girlfriend dying from an overdose. What followed was a cascade of verbal lashings coming from opposite sides of the room. It is unclear what was said. Both individuals were unintelligible because they were undergoing withdrawal symptoms, particularly the young man, who ground his teeth and spoke with a clenched jaw. During this exchange, something unraveled in Humphrey, either from something the boy said, or the egg timer of his rage finally sounded off. As the quick-witted young man continued to grunt out harbored frustration, his tears dripping onto the floor, Catskill stopped yelling and lowered his head, making eye contact in the way a predator would observe a weakness in a challenging alpha. He leaped up and flung his chair before anyone could even think to restrain him. The nineteen-year-old was bleeding from his head and Catskill had left the building before the shock of the event wore off. Even someone of Humphrey’s disposition knows he would be arrested if he came within a hundred yards of the shelter again. So, he finds it best to dwell in the shadows of alleyways and underpasses even during severe weather such as this, and rather try his luck getting a cigarette from a barfly who reminds him of his long-lost son.
Once again, he asks the barfly for a cigarette as softly as his raspy voice can manage. There’s no answer, so he starts to suspect the barfly is ignoring him on purpose. Then comes this twitch of paternal ire bubbling inside Humphrey as if the barfly is actually his son. Either way, his ignorance does not improve Humphrey’s already dejected mood. He hasn’t slept in four days, unable to get a drink in the last two. Booze sweats soak him thoroughly, and bitter perspiration freezes itself onto his tanned-hide skin. These indignities, coupled with bouts of violent nausea, bring about an irritable intolerance to people’s judging stares, their ignoring his general entreaty for spare change, change he’d spend at the liquor store or, if he were so bold, use as a prop to demonstrate to Bill, the owner of the Firehouse Bar and Grill (a favorite haunt of Ladder 43), that he finally had money and beg to be served just one drink, going so far as to say he himself used to be a firefighter at Ladder 43. This would spark Bill to put his proverbial foot down, declaring he didn’t give a damn what Humphrey did in a past life. The bottom line is that Catskill’s stench drives away customers and he can’t be running up tabs he’d never pay anymore. Moments such as these compel him to quietly utter a self-righteous diatribe rooted in a cycle of withdrawal, gratification, and back to withdrawal: Fucking dumbass pieces of motherfucking shit, you really want to judge me, I got something for you when you come out here.
The young, urinating barfly is inebriated to the point where any encounter involves a high probability of resolving itself through hostility, possessing a drunkenness evident from an uneven stance which causes his penile stream to wet his pants.
If the barfly were made aware or had taken the time to educate himself on this segment of the population, he might have found a better way to deal with the following encounter.
After the young man finishes, he turns to see the shadowy vagrant, asking once more:
Buddy, spare a cigarette?
Whoa, buddy. Back off, says the barfly, zipping up his wetted jeans.
Or some money so—
Dude, you need to get the fuck out of my face.
The attempted softness in Humphrey’s voice changes. His eyes roll to the back of his head while the tendons of his brownish neck expand and contract.
Catskill gets closer and says, Give me a cigarette.
They are so close they can smell the foulness in each other’s breath. The barfly declines the vagrant’s command, this time in a softer tone, seeing the red-lined, bulging twitch in the Catskill’s eyes. Humphrey’s mouth gapes in confusion, similar to the expression a child makes upon waking from surgery. At this moment, he does not feel the biting cold or smell the young man’s steaming-hot vodka breath but instead finds himself in a suburb at the age of eight just outside Long Island City. He’s about to push open a screen door, but not before his father hears the screech of the rusted metal spring and calls him into the living room where he’s listening to a record player—a moment Humphrey’s untethered mind uses as a trigger for what will happen next, a kind of baseline memory or an imagined hodgepodge of reordered experience so the mind can justify forthcoming decisions. Now the eight-year-old Humphrey Catskill can tell his father has been drinking all day because “Little Queenie” by Chuck Berry plays on repeat. The father orders his son to stand in front of him.
Mr. Catskill creaks back in a sunken plaid chair with stains on the armrests. Empty beer cans cover the small table next to the record player. The music is too loud for someone of Humphrey’s quiet, eight-year-old disposition to talk over, and it would not be wise for him to speak over the likes of Chuck Berry, whom his father recounted ad nauseum about a run-in he had with the father of rock and roll in a hotel lobby outside Baton Rouge. He swore there were three white women draped over him (possibly more). The number of women always changed according to how much Mr. Catskill had drunk that day.
Young Humphrey is afraid to joke along (even in appeasement) because he cannot gauge what his father finds funny anymore due to the erratic behavior his drinking creates. Humphrey’s father finds rudeness in throwaway comments, in questions regarding arithmetic, on U.S. presidents, or Jesse Jackson and his rainbows. Any posed curiosity the father considers to be an insult, which predestines a recycled tirade that this blatant show of disrespect on the part of the eight-year-old is the very reason why his mother left when she did.
“Little Queenie” finishes and the father lowers the volume. He leans back farther to observe his son standing attentively, cross-legged, stopping a fearful rush of urine from running down his shorts, an occurrence (were it to happen) that would no doubt ruin his chances of going outside to play with his best friend, Cary Olson.
The father strokes a hand across his chin, while crushing an empty can, and tells Humphrey to grab him another beer.
Humphrey obeys, making sure not to run in the house. He stands in front of his father again and gets close enough to hand over a fresh cold one.
Trying to sneak out of here, huh? asks Mr. Catskill, popping the tab.
No, sir. I wanted to go outside so—
You know, you kids don’t appreciate what real music is anymore.
The elder Catskill’s attention turns to the record player, like going back to a fond memory. He continues, Don’t ever appreciate it…even when you hear it. You understand me?
Sir, I’m only allowed to listen to the music you listen—
Watch your tone with me, boy. Got it? Good. You realize what I’ve had to do to keep a roof over your head? How we’ve had to survive without your mother? Don’t you?
Yes, every day I pray and thank God—
As you should, and what did I just say about tone? Think you’re bigger? Think you can take me? Think you’re all grown? Come on, tell me you’re grown.
Young Humphrey doesn’t say a word in regard to the subject of being grown, though he wants to. Angry tears well up in his blank face, a signal to the father that he still has the boy under his thumb, that Humphrey has neither the language nor the strength to resist him. Through trial and error, he knows that anything said in his defense (including a show of contrition) will only result in a dark bruise on his inner thigh or upper shoulder, places hard to spot if anyone suspected anything. Except none of the neighbors really want anything to do with the Catskills since witnessing a very public fight between the mother and father that resulted in her departure, a spectacle the whole neighborhood saw, including Humphrey who watched his mother make off with the family car while he watched the whole thing from the kitchen window.
The record moves onto another track. The music feels happily propulsive to the eight-year-old, enough to inspire him to run off and keep running down these quiet Mineola streets, over the bridge, and into the blistering caw of screeching tires and blaring horns where anyone could be alone amid a sea of bodies. Settling his thoughts into this imagined scenario, Humphrey waits until he believes enough time has passed for his drunken father to have forgotten his own question so the boy could pose an entirely different one. But the father intuits this, which, of course, he takes as an affront to his paternal authority.
Guessing you want to go out and play with that Jewy Olsenstein boy, huh? Is that what you want? Run around with those heebs. Huh, speak up!
Um, dad—I mean, sir. Cary Olson and his family don’t have a religion.
No religion! They want that boy to turn? I don’t want you around him when he does. People like that don’t teach their sons to be men. Understand me? What…Look at me. What’s gotten into you? You really want to be like that now? I said look at me.
I just want to go outside and throw the football. He invited me over. Please, he’s just a few houses—
Don’t want anyone over here, do you? My son…ashamed of me…
Dad, please—
What did I say about interrupting me!
Mr. Catskill leans forward and lands an open hand on the boy’s jaw. Humphrey winces prior to the impact, catching not the full force but enough to make him stumble.
The father gets up from his chair, his belt buckle staring into his son’s eyes, and says, Going to cry now, are you? Don’t you look away from me. Stop crying. Don’t even think about it. What. You turning on me? I know you’re not going to turn on me.
He lands a harder strike on young Humphrey’s opposite cheek and the moment is sucked away to the present day where he now feels the impact of the barfly’s hands pushing him away, saying, Get out of here. His eyes pop back into place, finished from staring into the far reaches of a mind unaware of itself. His neck practically steams with veiny tension. With his focus restored (at least for the moment), he reaches, and grabs hold of the barfly’s jacket. Quickened breaths escape from the barfly’s bitter vodka mouth.
You think I’m like that? yells Humphrey. You think I like that? Is that what you’re telling me?
What? says the barfly. Get your hands off me—
Come here.
In a paranoid whirl, Catskill launches his adversary deeper into the backstreet. Attempting to regain his footing, the barfly slips on a patch of ice and falls on his face. Humphrey runs over and turns the young man on his back and proceeds to land one punch after the other: square in the teeth, the eyes, then the nose until it collapses. He moves on to the cheekbones. His knuckles feel the curvatures of the youthful face flatten out. He mutters to himself throughout this whole process, You’re going to stop hitting me, stop hitting me, stop hitting me, understand? Understand me now?
The young man is unconscious, with a face now seemingly painted red. He breathes laboriously, a sighing wheeze, while his mouth pools blood.
Catskill peels himself off and looks into the sky, eyes darting around in beady confusion. In the dark, snow sky, snowflakes fall in pink clusters with the Avon Cinema’s neon light shining above them. Like the color of blood. The barfly stirs, then still.
Humphrey stands up, looking at his red, swollen hands and torn knuckles, and buries them in a pile of snow. Head on a swivel, he tries to see if anyone witnessed the event. The street remains silent. The cold vibrates up his hands, through his arms, shaking his body, and forces him to pull his hands out, leaving behind a red smatter.
He runs, panting, into the middle of the street. The reddish pink coming off the Avon Cinema’s neon-lit sign paints a rayon glow across his surroundings. The blood in the snow surrounding the aftermath of the altercation catches a purpled hue. He idles in the empty intersection. Dizzy and shaking from the adrenaline, he sees no shadows moving around, no police forming a perimeter. The street is even empty of those mired in a situation similar to his because they’d presumably found shelter. In a population of outcasts, Humphrey himself is an outcast and before diving into Catskill’s situation, attention must be paid to establish what he is not.
Like all demographics, the vagrant population consists of individuals whose stories differ in origin, sharing the one characteristic of living on the street. Among those in this contingent, Catskill occupies the bottom rung: not even a shelter will provide him a bed, nor a rehab facility accept his entry. Even people on the street find it hard to conjure up any empathy, let alone drop a dollar into his coffee cup. He is unlike the washed-out combat veterans who (in the case of a favorable ending) experience night terrors symptomatic of PTSD, reliving moments of finding children’s corpses stuffed with explosives strewn about on the side of the road, causing them to let out hellacious, agonizing screams that lead to high probabilities of divorce, domestic violence, eviction, and/or criminality. There are agencies that throw these young men onto mounds of bureaucracy that might get them a reliable counselor, perhaps on the pathway to a job, and with enough background checks and psychiatric evaluations, they just might move out of the shelter and into a group home while working a mechanic’s job at a Honda dealership, which affords them a subsidized condominium, allowing them an opportunity to finally call their son, in case he’d want to talk.
Nor is Humphrey like the family man who (in the case of a favorable ending) lets his family life collapse because of a toxic commitment to a position at a corporate firm; who, in order to stay in stride with the other junior executives, is compelled to ask a college friend to call a guy who knows a guy who can get him a few dozen capsules of Dexedrine, Concerta, or Adderall; before he knows it, he’s left alone in a two-bedroom apartment rocking back and forth with his chest hurting, landlord knocking on the door for rent money with no wife to answer the incessant rapping because she took the kids to her mother’s after he ripped the TV off the wall mount, and about a week later, this former family man shatters the breakroom coffee pot because he just couldn’t take Carole from Finance’s shit anymore, which results in immediate termination. But eventually, when a former colleague from business school spots this family man sitting on a park bench a year later, noticeably disheveled, this Good Samaritan calls his cousin who runs a flower shop. This former family man then proceeds to get clean up and work the register but has yet to hear from his wife and kids. So, during lunch break, he goes through the motions of refreshing his email every five minutes.
Likewise, Humphrey is very much unlike the mentally disturbed, drug-addled, genderly confused, genderly ostracized, sexually confused, sexually ostracized, bipolar, and/or abuse-fleeing teenage runaways who (in the case of a favorable ending) crash on friends’ couches until they get the news that there simply isn’t room anymore; who spend their days running the streets with shady characters, watching them nod off with a band wrapped around their arm, and then spend their nights quietly crying, pleading for a reason why God has forsaken them; who are then approached by a minister who’s standing on a corner and handing out fliers for a church that touts fresh starts, and then feel a sense of warmth in spotting the rainbow banner in the flier’s left-hand corner that compels them to attend a meeting after worship, who then accept an invitation to the new members’ luncheon, where they shyly gawk at the pretty volunteer handing out sloppy joes because their face has to be the prettiest they’ve ever seen.
While these examples don’t cover every aspect of the vagrant population, they aim to show the stark differences between them and someone in Humphrey Catskill’s circumstances. Contrarily, he is the type of unfortunate soul who fails to carry, let alone feign, any degree of shame or remorse for being in this position. He is not the type who writes illegibly on cardboard saying he’s a veteran or has simply fallen on hard times and anything helps, God bless. Humphrey is the type who only accepts money and gives a confused, annoyed look to anyone who offers him a sandwich instead. He takes the money and drinks it. To get money, he spins these various yarns about his urgent need to catch a bus he’ll never board. On most wintry nights, he would have a bottle of cheap whiskey cradled by his side to keep him warm, not requiring him to approach individuals like this unfortunate barfly.
Fleshing out this exercise in hindsight, one is left with the question of who is to blame for the events leading to this young man’s turmoil: the fact that the young man retaliated, the fact that Humphrey reacted to the young man’s aggression, the fact that Humphrey’s childhood laid out a bedrock of violence rendering him a rage-filled time bomb, or, alternatively, it is the fault of the hundreds of pedestrians who refused to provide him any means of any kind to aid him in a continuous escape from reality via drunkenness, thus prompting the desperation that led to the encounter in question. But now here he is, in the middle of the street, in the middle of a wintry squall, nodding off, half-asleep but wide awake at the same time. That state in which sleep deprivation becomes something the body has grown used to. He sweats out any liquor his body desperately clings to. That sweat freezes deeper into him, provoking even deeper shivers no matter how many layers of tattered cloth he wears underneath. He hears the unconscious, concussive groans from the alleyway, prompting a fear to run through Catskill—
My God, what did I do, I can’t stay here, I need to go—and soon the adrenaline and his hypothermia prompt flashing images of a possibly imagined past to run through a psyche crackling like ice in disembodied fragments.
He runs to the other side of the street, nearly falling, panting, and heaving. The numbing wet-warm throughout his body makes him feel like he is in a hot room, a room on fire, creating a familiarity: a sensation otherwise known as déjà vu. But whereas déjà vu in a normal framework gives the individual only the sense of having done something like this before, Humphrey is immersed in a full-fledged apparition from when he might have been a firefighter, a memory that can never be verified because the original Ladder 43 firehouse was, ironically, destroyed in a fire. His visit to this shadowy past comes simply as a moment of him holding a young girl by her head in a smoke-filled room. He places his breathing mask over her face. The curtains in the room catch fire and he runs out the door with the young girl in his arms. But given the convoluted nature of this man’s mind, he does not return to the alley next to the Avon Cinema just yet. He is transported to a ballroom, presumably at a gala with dozens of firefighters and their wives all seated politely, donning their finest suits adorned with patches and medals. A gentleman stands onstage. He taps the microphone while the spotlight shines on him against the backdrop of a red velvet curtain. In his hands, he holds a plaque.
Now, he begins, we’ve reached the awards portion of the evening. We’re going to start with the Jim O’Toole Outstanding Service Award, which goes to a firefighter who has exhibited courage and heroism in the face of danger. It is a particularly great honor for me to present this to someone who saved a young girl from suffocating in a house fire. In my fifteen years at Ladder 43, I’d never seen someone exhibit such bravery…and blind stupidity (audience laughs) because he knows I told him to stay back as the pipeman. But he just ran in! Hate to admit but thank God he didn’t listen to me. Ladies and gentlemen allow me to present the Jim O’Toole Award to Humphrey Catskill.
The spotlight moves to a table close to the stage, focusing on a seated man. A clean-shaven Humphrey leans back, waving in acknowledgment. His hair is cropped close. The jacket seems too big for him and has a crooked necktie, top button undone. The spotlight emphasizes the thick film of sweat pasted on his forehead and the redness throughout his face. A noticeably pregnant woman seated next to him claps along, giving a quiet look of concern mixed with pride as only a wife can wear upon knowing her husband is rather soused and about to make an acceptance speech. When Humphrey turns to make eye contact with the woman, her features blur and pixelate. He is unable to make out anything except an oval silhouette. He fails to push his chair out and nearly knocks over the gin-and-tonics strewn about the table. The applause continues, albeit awkwardly. He sways up the stairs and onto the stage.
He embraces the presenter, who hands him the plaque. The applause continues and the crowd summons a standing ovation. The spotlight disorients Humphrey, and he takes one step too many in the audience’s direction, slipping off the stage.
Similar to waking from a falling dream—a sensation of weightlessness while careening through a black pit that fills the sleeper with such anxiety that he feels thrust into waking, landing on the bed—such is the occasion for Humphrey’s ballroom tumble, which brings him back into their harsh snowy city. He feels sharp prickles on his skin. He looks for a place to hide, craning his head for any dark alley or shadowed park bench—a pitch blackness that would protect him from anyone searching for him.
The frigidity hitches up his legs to his chest to his arms to his fingertips as if he had just been struck on the funny bone, except the vibrations then morph into a scorching pulse. Something’s wrong, Catskill quickly surmises as his mind races for a solution. Usually, these moments (technically known as moments of clarity) spark radical change, revolutions in the mind to preserve itself from further metaphysical damage, and possibly death after an especially horrible decision, thus (speaking hypothetically) prompting Humphrey to go back and attend to the ailing, groaning barfly, which could then (hopefully) instill this pattern of reform where he’d attend his first AA meeting at a gymnasium in a local community center where he’d walk across the hardwood floor to find a room of men talking among themselves as they drink grainy coffee from Styrofoam cups.
But this is only possible if he possessed the proper faculties for such a transformation to occur. Not only that, but he would also have to wrestle with the fact that his irresponsible negligence is the reason why his own son went missing. The guilt rests within him, but he drinks to undo the memory of why he feels so guilty. To wrestle with that would mean an extended abstinence from the drink which poses only a double-edged sword. Either get sober and own up to his actions not only with the barfly but with his son or just continue suppressing these realities. He views these moments of clarity as overblown flare-ups of the mind that always end up short-lived. His already damaged psychological well-being has devolved into a state that, we could argue, borders on ferality—an instinctual moment-to-moment existence. Catskill knows he must get out of the street and into an alley with a vent excreting hot air. That is all his conscience can manage for the moment where only an apparition would compel him to branch out from this suffocating coil tightening around his soul.
The wind begins to pick up. A gust blows him sideways, causing him to hit his head on a brick wall. The impact sends him into a state most who have ever lived in a city are sure to have witnessed at some point: someone on a street corner muttering a self-sustaining dialogue as pedestrians funnel around them. We as ephemeral onlookers catch snippets that range from gibberish to compelling domestic drama projected from misplaced sentience—otherwise described as being aware of being alive, but murky on the details of how or where. Most of us, out of caution, pretend not to hear these outbursts and move away to disengage and carry on with our daily lives. For Humphrey Catskill, he is experiencing an amalgamation of these flashing moments rushing through his head, where he finds himself back onstage at the ballroom gala. However, instead of talking to an audience of fellow firefighters, he faces rows of tables upon rows of tables filled with blackened faces possessing no distinguishing features as if a faceless jury. The tables seem to expand and rise up, creating a sort of auditorium, cresting over Humphrey like a wave. Snowflakes gently make their way onto the scene. He has the microphone held up to his lips. He begins to talk in a way that might be his mind’s last-ditch effort to avoid creeping into the supposition that what he just did to the barfly was unforgivable and begins a soliloquy in which the days, months, years of damage mete out in uncontrollable projections of a mind trying so hard not to become one of those shadowy faces staring back at him:
Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen, it’s an honor to be here…certainly is …I only did what anyone else here would do, because you’re all men and you have respect for yourselves, and not one of you would want to be treated less than. She was in trouble, that little girl, and wouldn’t you have saved her? Answer me. Would any of you want to be called that word? I think not. Because I’ve been told that character is who you are when no one’s watching. So, who am I when no one’s watching? Well, let me tell you. My father—go, go, go, little queenie— always told me that the true character of men, and I mean real men, can be tested by the vilest of accusations, and I tell you real men don’t take to being accused of such things lightly, no siree. Not at all. You’ve got to believe me. I didn’t want to hurt him, but there wasn’t any other way, no way around it, no way at all…Would that little girl call me that? No, she wouldn’t. Believe me...the fucker thought I was gay—thought I was like that—and I don’t take that shit. He just wouldn’t let up and just kept calling me that and—and—and then he pulled out a knife, I swear I saw a knife. It’s the truth. I swear on my son’s life you have to believe me…there was a knife, ladies and gentlemen, you have to believe…
Throughout this oration, Catskill walks. Well, he more ambles in this alternating fashion of misstep and stumble, constantly flirting with tripping over. He then hears a faint, distant cry for help. The barfly calls out for someone, anyone, to please help him. He sounds like he’s in considerable pain. The terrified wail flies through the night, turning the blackened faces of Humphrey’s vision into ashen snowflakes taken by the wind, and the ballroom falls over like the backdrop to a theatrical production, becoming this familiar gray street in Connecticut once more.
The scream sends unwanted manifestations of a fist bludgeoning a face, and Humphrey’s eyes roll back to face yet again (as if through a distorted aperture) what he did despite every effort to avoid it. A beat of silence, and the crying returns, caught by the air. He moves faster away, away from the screams, but they seem to have sealed themselves onto him like an inner ear infection of netherworldly dirges.
He ducks into an alley and finds himself looking across the street at the still-open Firehouse Bar, its green awning bedecked with Christmas lights. In his off-the-rails consciousness, Humphrey takes this otherwise simplistic showing of holiday cheer as a trigger to the past (or fantasy); a time when things might have been better. As he leans against the wall, his thoughts glaze over to the point where he is now seated in a leather chair in front of a fireplace. A plaque with a chip on one side rests on the mantlepiece. To his left sits a woman, faceless, circling an evergreen tree with holly trailing over her shoulders. He feels a weight resting in his now-folded arms.
It is a sleeping baby boy wearing a red and green beanie, mouth slightly open. A Bing Crosby song Humphrey doesn’t know the lyrics to echoes while the woman circles the tree once more. A half-drunk bottle of whiskey appears on the floor beside him. He and the woman do not share a word with each other. A looming voice whispers into Humphrey’s ear, telling him this is too perfect a moment. Too perfect. He believes where he comes from and what he’s done should automatically disqualify him from the cosmic lottery system that assigns happiness and joy, especially when it comes to fatherly sensations like holding their child as it wrinkles its little nose, bestowing upon Humphrey an immense pressure to sustain himself, a feeling entirely unnatural as if he had been on a chain-link fence of predestination laid out by his father and his father before that. He cannot help but remember his father and Little Queenie go-go-going. He instinctively suppresses this memory by taking a long pull from the bottle under the woman’s blank gaze. He turns his attention back to the baby boy and feels wetness on his hand. Using one arm to support the infant’s neck, he observes that his free hand is covered in a fleshy red fluid, like congealed skin. The blanket is patched in blood. He hears himself saying, No…it didn’t happen…it couldn’t have happened, but the blood and the blanket and the living room turn to ash. Bing Crosby’s voice fades away, and what’s left of Humphrey’s consciousness ejects him from this vision and refocuses on the activity taking place inside the Firehouse Bar across the street. The regulars’ pantomimes create a muteness in his perspective, drowning out the wind, the snow. A muteness quickly interrupted by the sound of two voices, that of a woman and his own (when it possessed some degree of softness), hovering through the air. The voices seem to emanate from the bar as if their energy naturally exudes from the place, like unresting spirits sentenced to a purgatorial moment relived over and over.
Please, come home.
Another one, Bill.
No, Bill. Cut him off. He’s coming home. You missed his first steps.
Did I?
Just come home. Be with your son.
As quickly as they come, the voices fade away. The green awning Christmas lights come back into focus. Tears fall and freeze onto his face, and at this point, he is not even cold anymore. He can register bodily movements but cannot feel them. Then comes another moment of clarity echoed by the words, Be with your son. Now, Humphrey begins to furiously wonder (as if trying to outrun the next onslaught of unfiltered, garbled nonsense and sensory overload) what would his son say to him now. Would he say to keep running? Or would he look upon his father with disgust for leaving someone out in the cold?
What have I done? whispers Humphrey. I can’t let another one go. Not another one.
He turns back and sprints with his tattered clothes feathering in the wind, he hears the spiritual voices of the Firehouse Bar echoing in his head. He tries to outrun them, but it’s like trying to outrun the wind.
He returns to the barfly who has leaned up against the wall, curled like a golem, shivering violently. He looks up to see Humphrey standing over him, but he doesn’t scream. Catskill leans down, removes his jacket—a second skin—and places it over the barfly.
It’s going to be alright, says Humphrey. Try to keep warm. It’s alright.
The barfly cannot speak or won’t. His bloody face simply peers into Catskill eyes that dart around in paranoia, his mouth muttering, chattering non sequiturs. Eventually, the cold begins to overtake him, so he sits down next to the golemy barfly and closes his eyes. Before he knows it, he wakes to see a couple standing over them. They’re on the phone contacting the police, then Catskill’s consciousness fades out again.
As has been stated throughout this ordeal, Humphrey Catskill finds himself outside and exposed to the elements in a way that would make any one individual’s faculties desperately falter into a maelstrom of poor decisions. In his mind, he does not know what to make of anything in regard to veracity or comprehension. It can be argued such an inner discord would tear apart any man’s soul. As he plays and replays events that may or not have happened in a life imagined or borrowed, he subconsciously begins to break away from any semblance of self he has left. And that is where the soul comes into play because the soul like everything else people take for granted; we do indeed take our souls for granted because each of us has one. The torment from nights of overzealous cops giving kicks to the chest, telling Humphrey to move along because he can’t sleep there, and the dark mornings waking to the hot acidity of urine from drunken college kids wanting to make an example of this low life curled up on a front porch; moments such as these would force anyone to assuage their pain to numbness. Because in those moments, as anyone can attest who feels the pull of one more drink when he knows he really shouldn’t, we don’t have memory (at least in that moment). In other words, whatever reasons we have for sitting alone on a barstool vanishes. The drunkenness permits us not to remember, but just for a moment. Drinking in that lonely limbo away from judging eyes, hawking spit, and the sheer cold, therefore, leads one like Humphrey Catskill to muddle himself into a slur-laden existence, and this is when the soul really starts to become undone. The soul, like every other part of the body, learns from its past, and when that past is cut off or cut up, it is like a region of the brain not getting enough oxygen. Indeed, a suffocation of spirit. Because the soul is never identified until it is utterly irreparable. Similar to when a pro football player’s brain scan indicates CTE only after he's shot himself in the chest on a motel room bed. Here, like Humphrey, we can see these memories imprinted on a post-mortem soul taking a new shape as all memories do over time, but in a way that extracts truth, the intuition of a rationalized lesson from a horrific past: that babysitter who locked you in a closet, or that stepdad cooing Who’s Daddy’s little girl, or that coach who said you’d never be good enough and one torn ACL later you find yourself on a barstool realizing that son of a bitch was right. Catskill’s memories no longer create these clarifications or indications of why he is a certain way. In actuality, they become a new thing entirely: warped, extracted entities living in a dark region of one’s mind that neverendingly stares back at people like Humphrey, and the only way to process such a horrific realization is to stave it off via constant disorientation, a.k.a. drinking. The memories are a collage of what a soul used to be, but souls are meant to teach lessons brought out from hardship, and that is why Humphrey does not possess one he can counsel, only one to revile and run away from as it becomes further bastardized in a slew of justifications and unprocessed trauma, only creating a favorable result—like the present moment—where he puts his jacket over the injured barfly’s shivering body. Not out of some moral epiphany, but out of a flailing, an impotent attempt to right a wrong already committed, too late to rectify, being the reason his son is gone. He tries saying to the young man that everything will be alright, but he finds himself fading, mute—warm—cold—hot—numb. Snowflakes attach to Humphrey’s face, masking a frostbitten set of cheekbones and clogged nostrils. He whispers, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Fading in and out of consciousness, he sees himself in the same living room as before, but this time there is no fireplace, no Christmas tree, no baby in a beanie. Just a woman’s voice filling the room. Such a familiar voice—
What are you doing here, Humphrey?
I just want to see my kid. Please…let me see—
Absolutely not. I can smell you from here.
Why won’t you let me see him?
What type of question is that? After what you put us through, how can you expect me to let you near him? I should call the cops right now.
It’d been three months, honey, I was fine. I told you already, it was only five minutes. I didn’t even drink.
Just like your father…You’re lying.
Don’t you dare…You know how that gets me. You can’t say that. I try every day to not see myself in him!
Some effort you’ve put out. Ninety days…that’s it?
Stop, he’s in my head. I can’t get him out and you keep digging him into me. No matter what I do, he’s in my head.
Just stop! You make me sick…You’re making this about you. I didn’t leave him in the car. You did! I know for a fact you didn’t leave him in the car for just five minutes.
Honey, I told you—
You were in that bar for hours. Admit it! You were in there drinking. I knew that from the moment I came to the station. I know that look…And because of what you did, I had to come and get my son from a police station. Because of what you did, I have child services dropping by twice a week to see if I’m a fit mother. You don’t get to see him. You don’t have the right. Get out. I said get out!
Humphrey awakes to see the lights from the city and the police cars’ flash in the snowy night sky. Normally, one is practically frozen at this juncture of hypothermia, but Humphrey is able to make himself sit up and stare out at the flickering red and blue. A canopy of streetlights and red lights and blue lights and Christmas lights shimmer in double vision as the snow falls. In the case of a favorable ending, this would be the part where Humphrey Catskill might experience hallucinations, comforting spectrals in the form of the little girl he may have saved, the mother who may have left him, his wife who may have at one point loved him, all looking at him in a cloudy focus as the police approach. Comforting spectrals that all wrap themselves around him in one last moment of togetherness, a soul restored in the cartwheeling snow before reaching a realm beyond comprehension. But he cannot see past the brightness of the lights shining into his eyes. No comfort. No peace. Only continuance. And now, Humphrey Catskill feels himself being lifted and placed in the back of a cop car. There’s a twinge of warmth, a warmth nearly alien, though reminiscent of a Christmas fireplace, and Humphrey curls up as the car heater pulls him to sleep.
— MATT GILLICK
Matt Gillick is from Northern Virginia. He is a co-founding editor of Cult. Magazine. Recent work in Bruiser, decomp, and Santa Ana River Review.