Flesh is Flesh

Greg’s got a mantra in his head that just keeps going:  I am entering the world like a big, naked baby. He turns the deadbolt and opens the door.  Like a big, naked baby. The grass outside is starting to grow back from being dead over the winter.  Most of his neighbors have already given their yard its first trim of the spring and the smell of cut grass hangs around.  The neighborhood is quiet except for the rattle of air conditioners and squawking from the birds.  Greg’s jaw trembles as he crosses into his yard.  A breeze tickles past every hair on his naked body.  His pecker swings in the cold.  Greg walks out onto the sidewalk.  It’s ecstasy.  His mind is clear.  He is one with nature.  He sees the paper lying at the end of the driveway, a foot into the street.  It is the furthest away it has ever been.  He moves in his nakedness, creeping slowly off the sidewalk towards the road, the grass damp between his toes, the wind soft on his rear.

Greg closes his eyes.  He feels like Adam in the garden, his back upright and his chest all full of ribs.  He feels like naked baby Moses, floating in a basket in the water, ancient, motherless, complete.  He imagines himself as Jesus, wind on skin, hanging.

When he opens his eyes, the world feels new.  He strains his ears for the pop of a car door or an engine’s purr somewhere down the street.  All is still.  He reaches the paper and toes it.  It is wet with dew with bits of gravel clinging to the damp pages.  He bends over, folded in half and receptive to the peace of the world.  He wants the peace of the world to enter him, but then he feels weird about it and hopes the peace of the world can’t read his brain.  The wind touches him as he inhales, touches him as he exhales, touches him as he takes hold of the newspaper and secures it under his armpit.

A dog barks down the street.  A car door slams shut.  Greg races back toward his house, dives into the open door, and slams it shut.  He leans against the door panel.  He closes his eyes and feels his heart pound, the dampness of the newspaper just starting to chafe his armpit.  He feels his body vibrate. When he turns around to toss the newspaper on the table, Shirley is there, wrapped in her towel, staring at him like a snake from the hallway.  Her arms are crossed in disgust.  They look at each other.

“Sick sonuvabitch,” she says.

“Just leave me alone.”

“Look at you, damn sicko.  God, oh God,” she covers her mouth with her hand, faking like she’s about to throw up.  “Going out there with a hard-on.” Greg pulls his hands over his pecker but doesn’t look at her.  “The old bat from across the street called.  Said she’s done called the police.  I told you she wasn’t bluffing, neither.”

“Get out of my way,” Greg says, trying to edge past her down the narrow hall to the bedroom.  “My business is my business.”

“Running naked around the whole neighborhood is your business?”

“The day I let you tell me what I can and can’t do-”  She leans up against him and blocks his way.  “Hell, you gone let me put some clothes on before the cops show up, aren’t you?”

“Hell no,” she says, “If you can prance around the neighborhood like that, you can go to jail like that, too.”

“Satan,” Greg says, looking into her for a soul that might be buried deep. “Get on behind.”  He waits.  “I aint gonna tell you again to move.”  Shirley does not move, fixed like a boulder in the hallway with her towel tucked high above her chest.

He grabs her shoulders and tries to force her out of the way.

“No, hell no, you sicko,” she says as she resists.  “They gone catch you just like you should be caught, and I hope they bring the picture taker to come and put you on the front page.”

“Then you gonna be on there with me,” Greg says.  He snatches a corner of her towel hanging limply at her knee.  He yanks on it, but she has another corner clawed tight.  It unravels from her body, and they fight over it.

They wrestle over the towel, tugging back and forth in quick, sharp pulls.  “You sick sonovabitch,” she says.  Streaks of flesh and slinging elbows.  The towel is stretched tight between them.  Shirley heaves and kicks.  Greg stumbles off balance.  She lands her painted red toes into his balls and he grunts and collapses.  Shirley snatches the towel from him and runs to their bedroom.  As the door slams, Greg twists and howls on the floor.  The lock clicks.

“Devil,” he screams at the door.  He gets up and searches hazily around the room for something to cover his body.  He limps to the kitchen table where he threw the newspaper and picks it up, sliding off the rubber band and uncoiling the front page from the business section.  He looks at the headlines without really reading them before he opens the page and gingerly holds it in front of his loins.

Greg pictures himself, how he might look to the officer that comes to the door.  The officer will check the headlines that cover him.  They’ll be something bad.  And the officer would have been up that night thinking about the headlines, having seen it in the flesh and not just in the word.  The officer’s eyes will get sad.

We are big naked babies, Grey will say to him, and they’ll both believe it.  They’ll both get born again.