...And the Damage Done by Michael Marano

. . . AND THE DAMAGE DONE
    I see them, and they know I see them. That is why they want to break me: because I see. The theatre of stealth they enact is just that—theatre . . . designed to exhaust me, so that I forfeit my vision. I should stand from the cigarette-scarred table, walk away from their performance. But my friend is dying, and I’d sooner die than leave her.
    Marie smiles at me with lips turning the color of lead. She sips coffee with a mouth that should soon go into rictus, and I ache to kiss her mouth and say a true good-bye.
    “So, I’m doing better,” she says. That she means it twists a flat blade in my heart. She runs her thumb along her cup while her eyes film, as if skins peeled from eggshells are pressed upon her irises. She has always met my eyes with her stone-deep gaze, and that is one reason I’ve always loved her. I should take the hand that has left her cup and now rests on the table beside a profession of love knife-etched into the wood years ago. But I’m afraid of what I’d feel under her skin, that the feeling would brim my vision, that I would flinch at the touch of loose skin sliding over bone.
They
who press their sight on me like sweat-slick fingertips would know that such vulnerability would clench my spine and make themselves yet more visible to me. My hand is bound to where it rests, as I am bound to this city of my hijacked birth.
    Instead of taking her hand, I meet Marie’s eyes, now gone the white-blue of watered milk. I smile back. The skin of her shoulders, of which she has always been vain, is as-yet unblemished, still snow-smooth and firm. Her tattoos seem transparent as stained glass. Both her hands, which have cupped my face while I grieved, now rest on the table. I hate that I have pinched out, even partly, the light that had come from her smile. Once, while awaiting a bus across from her apartment, I saw Marie’s sister walk to the building’s front door with the grace that only one who has studied dance as a child has and press the ringer. Marie leaned out her window and waved before buzzing in her sister. From above, Marie’s smile had banished the gloom that clung to that shitty place more surely than did the dying paint on the chipped brick buildings. Her light challenged the sky, and, as if in shame, the sky rallied and for a few heartbeats seemed able to house choirs of seraphim, to become a sky like that over Sinai in a Bible painting.
    I take her hands and redeem what I can of her light.
They
lean out of the faceless banks of the innocent, forcing themselves into my vision the way that stones in spring press themselves out of thawing soil; a remembered pain runs under my jaw from ear to ear and over my brow, and I feel the parting of skin that is not mine being cut like kid leather.
    I should leave this city. But I am tied here by the only relation I have on this Earth, who despite the womb we shared is not, nor will ever be, a relation of blood.
    One of
them
filths the space I share with my friend, setting down his newspaper and grinning as if Marie and I are lovers through whom he lives vicariously. In a more civilized time, one who lived in a port city such as I would have never encountered those to whom he is joined, for they would have been far-flung sailors afraid to drown. They who watch, and who do nothing else, are not sailors who dread scalding brine in their lungs; they bear the corruption unique to those whose hands will never know a callus.
    I
see
. I do not
hear
. Such deafness can be a mercy. For the creak of the brittle leather that Marie’s hands feel like would be much more than I could bear. “Do you remember . . .” I say. “Do you remember how cold it was, the last time we held hands?”
    “It was freezing,” she says, and I reach as would a drowning man for the sensations of that fog-chilled San Francisco night. Her death-gloved hands grip mine tighter. “Why?”
    “It was kind of nice,” I say. “I liked holding your