Mercy Street(31)

The webmaster gig paid nothing; then again, it was almost no work. Once in a while he made an addition to the calendar of events: a Rosary rally, Stations of the Cross, a bus trip to a community theater in New Jersey for the annual performance of Veronica’s Veil. After a while he requested, and was given, the title webmaster, which Father Renaldo was happy to do as it was cheaper than paying him. Immediately Anthony printed up business cards with his name in raised gold letters: ANTHONY BLANCHARD, WEBMASTER.

He noticed a backward parenthesis on the Calendar of Events. As he made the correction, he heard footsteps overhead.

His mother called from the top of the steps: “Anthony, are you home?”

She clomped down the stairs. Her gray hair was teased into its usual configuration, bubble-shaped and hard as a helmet, lacquered with hairspray to last the week.

He met her at the foot of the stairs. “Ma, what did I tell you about knocking?”

“Sorry, sorry. You want me to go back and knock?”

“I’m a grown man. I have a right to privacy. I could have a girl down here.” He didn’t add that he could be jerking off, which was far more likely, or that he could be smoking a bowl, which was likelier still.

His mother sniffed dramatically. “It smells down here.”

“I don’t smell anything.”

She said, “Where have you been?”

“Where have I ever been? I went to Mass.”

“Don’t get snippy. I’m just asking.”

“After that I went into town,” he said, “to see a friend.”

His mother brightened. “You have a friend?”

“I have lots of friends.”

“In Boston?”

Anthony sighed, exasperated. “It was Tim Flynn, if you must know. Maureen’s brother.”

“Who?”

“You remember Maureen. My girlfriend.”

“When did you have a girlfriend?”

Anthony did not dignify this with a reply. Lately he got the sense that his mother thought he was gay, an impression he didn’t bother to correct because the truth was even less flattering.

“Well, at least you got out of the house. Maybe you should look for a job,” his mother said, as though this had just occurred to her. As though it hadn’t been their number one subject of conversation for his entire life. “They’re hiring down at Stop & Shop.”

“A grocery checker,” he said.

“You could work your way up, like Sal with the frozen foods.”

This was her second-favorite subject of conversation. Anthony’s cousin Sal, on the Fusco side, was the frozen foods manager at a Star Market in Lynn or Saugus or wherever the fuck he lived.

Anthony said, “I have no interest in frozen foods.”

“It’s not about interested. It’s about you have a job.”

“I have a job,” he said for the thousandth time. “On the internet.”

His mother, who had only a vague idea what the internet was, had no answer for this.

“I’ve explained this,” he said with infinite patience. “I get some crap job at Stop & Shop, I lose my Disability.”

He’d been collecting for fourteen years: longer than he spent in school, longer than he’d done anything in his entire life. In the deadbeat Olympics, he had won the gold medal: permanent and total incapacity. All because of a single moment on a Tuesday afternoon, in a South Boston tunnel pit.

His monthly check was modest—sixty-six percent of what he’d earned at Mancini Construction, plus an annual cost-of-living adjustment—but it beat Stop & Shop money, frozen foods money. Broken down to an hourly wage, it was even more impressive. He spent zero hours earning his monthly nut. He got paid just for staying alive.

THE PARTICULARS OF THE ACCIDENT WEREN’T REAL TO HIM, they lived in the realm of rumor and conjecture. According to witnesses, an unsecured beam had made contact with Anthony’s hard hat. The force was great enough to knock him out cold. On the Glasgow Coma Scale, he was rated a nine. (Loss of consciousness for less than thirty minutes, cognitive impairments that may or may not resolve.)

At a certain point the hospital discharged him. Anthony was hazy on the details. The state was involved, workers’ comp, the union maybe. Claims were processed. He was assigned a caseworker whose name he forgot immediately.

He sat in a dark room holding his head.

In that year, 2002, he lived nowhere. He lived only in his body, a troubled neighborhood rapidly going to seed. Ringing in his ears, a sickening vertigo. He sat very still and listened to his interior weather, his organs slipping and sliding against one another like a bag of dying fish.

The body in all its exigencies, its variegated symptoms, its colorful complaints.

His mother hired an attorney who advertised on TV, in between reruns of Law & Order. A caseworker whose name he couldn’t remember gave him advice he couldn’t remember.

“Total permanent. I can’t imagine they’d refuse you,” she said, looking him up and down, and in spite of himself he was offended because she didn’t look that great herself.

His head was examined by every means possible. He lay in a metal tube that made otherworldly noises. After an hour or a month, who could tell, he was excreted through the tube. His vitals were taken—blood pressure, resting pulse. The numbers were a kind of code, elegant, inscrutable. Anthony added them together to discern their meaning, the unreported stories of the body contained therein.