He told them about himself. He was once a young man on top of the world, in love with his beautiful wife, proud of his angelic daughter, a hard worker and this close to a promotion at work. Life was swell, and the times couldn’t be better. He ate well, slept better, and made love every night with an overwhelming passion that hadn’t died in the seven years he and his wife had been married. And then…

Then things had taken a turn. He had walked into work bright and confident, remembering the pot roast he had the night before and the silly little smile on his daughter’s face as he fed her tiny bites of meat, and walked out dejected, shoulders slumped and inching along in an old man’s shuffle, the small pink slip clutched in his left hand. But when he reached the door of his home, he straightened his shoulders and pasted a broad, invincible grin under his nose, boomed through the door, grabbed his wife, reminded her how much he loved her with a kiss like an emotional earthquake, and then gave his daughter a kiss on the cheek, which she returned with a loving spot of saliva on his ear.

“You must have had a good day at work,” his wife said, her eyes still a bit glassy.

He smiled again, being brave. Not quite, he told her, pulling the pink slip from his hand, torn a little as his fist wouldn’t relax. Not to worry, though, he assured her. He was a strong man, in his prime, smart and successful, and we’ve got plenty saved up, work would come to him and everything would be fine. She remained unconvinced, but went back to snapping the ends off the green beans for dinner.

Work didn’t come–in fact, it hid. He and his family moved from their cozy apartment to the relative slums. Husband and wife began to resent each other, she because he was unemployed, he because she complained constantly. Their savings dwindled to next to nothing, and the couple were forced to swallow their pride and line up at St. Mary’s Thursday night Soup Kitchen where they got a warm meal and the companionship of the pigeon lady who roamed the park at night and Mr. Whispers, self-named and hard to miss in his antique top hat and ragged, fingerless gloves of scarred leather.

She started to nag, he started to yell. Their daughter, now three and a half, watched with wide, innocent, uncomprehending eyes. They made love less often.

Two years after the loss of his job, she left him, taking their daughter. He was a dead-end, good-for-nothing, just like her father had said, and she regretted the day the veil lifted from her face.

He settled below the fire escape on the blanket he had found lying in the gutter; he wondered why, it was practically new and didn’t smell too bad. The whistles he had bought for three cents each at a Chinatown shop that sold everything from intricate maps of the city to cages for crickets (made in China) to jars of aged blueberry preservatives. He resold them for seven cents apiece. He thought four cents profit was plenty to live on.

His blindness was a result of too many nights seeking the moon through the smog belched into the sky during the day, the raw rain splashing into his eyes, the filth of his surroundings, the cold of the winter, the heat of the summer, fleas, sweat and his own urine that stewed about him. He never closed his eyes once, though, through all of it; they filmed over with a milky blue mantle reminiscent of pale spring skies, back when the city was clean and fresh. His age came about for many of the same reasons. When he turned forty-five, he looked sixty; when he turned fifty, he looked eighty. Well, that was to be expected.

His hat lay next to his leg, always accepting the few spare cents that the generous dropped. Usually at the end of the day, there was about two or three dollars in quarters and pennies in his cap, enough to buy a drink and some cheap food; it wasn’t much, but he survived. He feared nothing, really, and even began to enjoy his life sitting beneath the fire escape, the dark reigning, but memories always in vivid color. He lived and relived the times he spent with his family as a young boy, his life before his wife, dark days filled with brothels and late night drinking with his friends, and then her advent into his life, a beacon of what could be. Their wedding, the honeymoon, the birth of Eliza, but then he stopped thinking. He didn’t want to remember what had brought him here.

Every morning and evening, a certain man walked past our emaciated, shriveled hero, silently simmering. His own life was near perfect, truth be told; he had a lovely woman at home, though the exact state of their relationship, whether married or not was never made quite clear, a daughter whom he adored (again, the status of this little girl was uncertain: a daughter, or the woman’s daughter, or an adoption–either way, he loved her very much) and a son from a previous marriage who made him proud to bursting every day, a rather boring job, to be completely honest, but it paid well and required minimal effort.

Homeless people bothered him. Why couldn’t they get off their lazy asses and find a job, just like he did when he was very young? Life hadn’t been kind to him; he’d had to work for everything he’d ever had. This one in particular annoyed him. Everything about him screamed lazy: his unkempt beard, long enough to serve as a blanket, his smell, his cheap little whistles that no one ever bought, but most of all, that hat.

That hat drove him insane. Why should some pathetic old man be able to sit there all day, doing nothing, getting paid for it, while he, he who had worked his whole life had to get up every morning at six, shower and shave, dress and have to skip breakfast, and then work all day–all fucking day–while this bum just sat, doing nothing, staring into whatever he could see. It infuriated him. It began to eat at him. Every time he passed the old man, he clenched his fists and ground his teeth, frustrated and angry. It seeped into his life: he shouted at his girlfriend/wife/lover, was too harsh with the little girl, ignored his son.

It got worse as each day passed. He began to dread getting up and hated when he glanced up from his paperwork to see that ten hours had passed, it was time to leave and pass the old man again. He tried walking an alternate route, but it took him through dodgy neighborhoods and trash-strewn streets; no, he preferred the torture of passing the man to risking his life, thank you.

The Friday afternoon he passed the man, he was thinking of those annoying reports he had to complete over the weekend in order to meet his deadline the following Tuesday. He’d have to work all day Saturday, into the night, and then maybe a bit on Sunday too. What a pain in the ass. It’d take him forever; and he would be off the clock, no overtime for this. He groaned. What a weekend. His son would put on that hideous heavy rock, too, just to piss him off. He really needed to spend some time with that boy, but he never seemed to have the time; work was just too busy, what with the merger and all. He’d find time soon, just as things cleared up.

Still, though, it was infuriating that he should have to deal with this. The anger was coursing though his veins, fists clenched and straining against the confines of his cotton button-down.

He passed our ragged hero without noticing him for a change. But today, unluckiest of days, the old man decided to speak to him.

“Rough day, huh?”

The man stopped. He did not think. He did not hesitate. He just acted.

When he was done, the old man lay in the gutter, broken, bloody; the man towered over him gasping for breath like a winded bull, amazed at his own anger, ashamed of the action. He wouldn’t tell anyone about this, he’d just go, just leave, just leave and eat his dinner and sleep in his bed and spend the weekend working–good, honest work.

He did exactly that, but his mind was on the old man the entire time. He could see every swing, watched the man fall again and again into the gutter.

And then one night, weary of reliving the horrors of his actions over and again, he resolved the next day to apologize, to stitch up the oozing wound in his soul. He did not think of the old man’s pain and his the burden of humiliation that lay thick upon his brow.

Without much warning or introduction, the next day the man walked right up to the poor street beggar and offered his apologies. “I’d like you to come over for dinner tonight,” he said. The blind beggar dipped his head obligingly and replied through cracked teeth in a cracked voice: “Sure, sure, sir, if you please,” whistling pathetically over the s’s and nodding like a demented parrot.

“Good.” The man seemed to cave in a little, and his tight white collared shirt grew bigger on his frame. “I’ll return for you after work and we can go back to my place.”

The beggar man, for the first time in centuries, felt an excitement stir the butterflies that had lain dormant in his stomach. He eased himself off his blanket, a process which, due to his recent injuries, took the good part of an hour, and began to walk, gathering up his hat and leaving his Chinese whistles on the urine-drenched blanket. He began to meander around the city, picking up odds and ends wherever he could find them: a tattered top hat, grey with age, in a dumpster in the theater district, a bunch of wilted baby’s breath in the rich side of town, undoubtedly originally from a bouquet of roses, and to his supreme delight, an uneaten cheeseburger nestled atop a twenty dollar bill in a birds nest in the park.

Returning to his blanket, he eagerly awaited six o’clock, two hours away, clutching his baby’s breath bouquet, wearing his ridiculous top hat, and staring with glee at his cheeseburger and the grease-stained twenty dollars that lay jumbled in his many layers. He sat so still for the two hours that several birds perched on the brim of his hat and his shoulders, adding to his bizarre appearance. He got more money in his old hat that day than ever before, the strangers staring over their shoulders with sad, sad looks on their faces.

When the man came around at six twelve, the clown that awaited him seemed so different from the broken beggar he had left nine hours before.

“Ready?” he asked abruptly. The shirt had grown tight again.

The clown stood, not disturbing the birds, gripping the now dead flowers, and put the cheeseburger in his pocket along with the twenty dollar bill: he didn’t want them to feel lonely. They made their way down the boulevard, past the town homes filled to the brim with children and disappointment, past the fake Irish pub, still decked out in green from St. Patrick’s day three months ago, and over the river to the man’s neighborhood, a dull but peaceful area, one of the few quiet places in the screeching city.

The beggar’s heart was racing. The excitement was almost too much to bear; he wet himself slightly in anticipation. All of a sudden his birds deserted him, winging off to some other statue that didn’t move as much. He barely noticed. The smells of home-cooked food that reminded him of his past life tickled his nose, making his mouth water.

Up the stairs: six flights. No easy task for the broken beggar, but the smell beckoned, wrapped around him and pulled him like a lifeline, pumping air into the spirit of a dying man. Each step brought him closer to the warmth of food and the collapse of his knees–closer, closer, closer, step, step, step. A landing: a hallway: more steps, steps, steps, carpet gentle on his jelly knees. The shirt grew tighter. The flowers trembled in his fist. His pants grew wetter.

“Mike! And your guest,” said the woman when the door flew open. “Miiiiiike!” the girl shouted, throwing herself at his legs, wrapping herself around his knees, trapping him in his place. His son sat at the table, slouched, and turned around when the woman said the word “guest”. At the sight of the beggar, his eyes and smile grew wide, shiny with wonder at such a marvel. The little girl, though, shied away and hugged her mother’s knees instead.

The blow hit him ferociously and without warning; a tidal wave of memories crashed over him and he fell over, fell to the ground, where his wife ran to see what was the matter, and his daughter screamed.

“Jack.”

“What would you like for Christmas, Jack?”

“I want a basketball and a basketball hoop and a swimming pool and a hockey team and a truck I can really drive and a pair of light-up sneakers and a puppy and a…” This litany continued for thirty-seven minutes straight. The boy did not stop for breath nor slow his pace, and stopped only when his face turned blue and his lips swelled so that they looked like two fat slices of pink, raw tuna, contrasting with his blueberry face. His mother had yanked him off the poor old man, still fantasizing about crumbly muffins with dried cranberries hidden in them like prizes, appalled that she could have ever let that man near her child; he had almost suffocated Jack!

Every day for a month he sat up on a pedestal, children flocking to him for a chance to sit on his lap, mothers nearby smiling indulgently. He was courteous, attentive (to a point), and had a special way of calming the children. Most of them, anyway. Some just didn’t want to be calm and threw tantrums in his lap. Once a five-year-old girl had ripped his jacket clean off, exposing the suspenders and flannel undershirt protecting his respectable girth.

The children weren’t always unpredictable, but every other child in line (it seemed!) pulled his beard, tore his hat off and threw it to the far corners of his small edifice, snatched buttons from his jacket, kicked him in delicate areas, and wet his lap with fear or anger. Their little squealing voices asked for intricate and impossible gifts that could never be made on time nor placed under a Christmas tree. Every time he sat on his throne-like seat, all these incidents flashed through his mind like lightning bugs. He dreaded the first child and the second, the third; all of them. They pinched him and laughed in his face, making him afraid. When he went to sleep at night he saw their faces in his dreams, yelling, screaming, crying, laughing so loudly his head throbbed and ears rang, their mouths stretched like elastic bands so close he could count the teeth, the innumerable teeth. He would awake both nauseous and afraid, terrified of the next day when his nightmares became his experiences.

Yet each day he went back. Every day, he returned to the hated chair to start his torture all over again. He had to. It was his job. It was his reason for living. What else could he do? Night after night he labored over the toys in his workshop. The elves had left years before, angry about the lack of health care, so long ago he could barely remember. With them went the reindeer. The goodbyes had been painful and tearful, but though their departure made him work even harder than before, he had to keep going to meet the deadline.

And like he promised, he watched them all. He knew when they were bad or good, when the brushed their teeth, when they went to bed, how they did in school; he heard snippets of conversation about their pets and haircuts. What he saw and heard wasn’t much, but enough to let him know who deserved what. Every day at about seven in the evening when he had finished about half his work, he trudged up and down the streets, peering into windows. Even then, safely separated by glass and darkness, he felt afraid of them.

He felt afraid now, curled in his sleigh, surrounded on all sides by seas of little faces, bright with the cold and excitement. They pounded him on the back, pulled at his clothes, screaming, yelling, squealing, “Santa, I want-”, “Santa, I want-”, “Santa”, “Santa”, “Santa, I want!”. Always “I want, I want I want I want I want I want I want I want I want.” They would get, he made sure of that. But what he gave never was good enough. Every year, the day after he met his deadline, he peeked into their windows, waiting for the slight gratification he would feel. That little bit of gratitude each year pierced through the clouds of fear he felt, enough to keep him warm and give him a bright memory for the next long, dark year ahead. Each year he was let down by the looks of quick disappointment covered by carefully controlled faces.

The crowd of children receded; free candy canes were being thrown onto the other side of the street. He cautiously poked his head beyond the protective curve of the sleigh, then righted himself to prepare for the next onslaught of children.

* * *

That night he worked as usual until seven. The toys had grown to a sizeable number; he felt a deep pride for them. Though the piles hadn’t moved since he started years and years ago, he knew one day they would make thousands of children happy. He’d sneak in at some very late hour on Christmas Eve and nestle them under the tree, next to the brightly wrapped gifts left by the parents in his name. He always appreciated that. The idea that someone would do his work for him always made him happy. Although their gifts were more exciting than his own crude wooden toys, he knew that the wooden ones would last much longer than their fancy, colorful presents. If only he could find a way to get in their houses, despite his fear.

He planned on walking for about a half hour before returning to work throughout the night. His first stop each night was the corner house two blocks away. The little girl that lived there grew slowly; it seemed as though she had been five years old forever. Her parents loved her very much, he could tell, and she did well in school. She would get the best toy, he thought, the duck on wheels.

His rounds continued until about 7:25, when he reached the little boy’s house. He was in his bathroom, the door closed. As the man watched and waited for him to come out, he heard a rustling to his left. His fear took over. Quickly looking to the left, he saw a man standing stock-still with a bag of garbage in his hand, each individual thing made clear through the translucent plastic by the moonlight.

“What are you doing?” he asked. The old man said nothing, but began to back away along the hedges.

“What are you doing?!” he yelled, throwing the garbage bag down on the pavement. The contents spilled out, making patterns with their bright colors against the concrete. The old man turned and ran. The other man, surprisingly, didn’t follow, but rather went inside. Safe. The fear loosened its grip a bit. The old man went back to the window and resumed watching the boy. He was in bed now, lying on his side, reading a book. He watched for a little while longer, then turned and headed towards the driveway. Safe.

Out of nowhere came a siren. The piercing noise was just like the screaming children that surrounded him every day, demanding gifts. He ran. He had to get away from that noise, that awful noise that disturbed his dreams and plagued his days.

His bulk slowed him. His feet began to pass each other less often, and he started walking. When the car got near him, he started running again, only to be yanked from the road by two burly men in black uniforms.

“No!” he screamed. “I’m Santa! The children! My toys! Santa! Santa! Santa! Let me go! I want to go! Santa! I want! Santa! Santa!”

***

When I was little, my dad has told me, I was watched by an old man that believed he was Santa. The authorities went to his house and found mounds of rough wooden toys, things like wooden balls, yo-yos, ducks on wheels, and other simplistic playthings. He had worked at the department store nearby, posing as Santa Claus for the children. I even remember clambering onto his lap, playing with his beard, laughing and smiling widely at him in my joy. Nobody could remember when he started working there, it seemed like it had been forever.

Unfortunately, he died in jail a few days ago, imprisoned under the sentence of a sexual predator. I don’t think he was any such thing. The poor old man was confused, crazy, and probably believed he really was Santa. After acting for so long, it’s easy to imagine why he’d think so.

More than anything, I wanted Nero to be a good boy. I supervised him and his playmates always, peering out of a window or watching while doing some crude chore, peeking from behind a shutter, making sure no game got too rough or the teasing went beyond gentle pokes. Occasionally I’d squeeze under his bed and listen to his playmates plot an excursion to the hills the next day, breathing as little as possible so as not to be discovered. Every now and again he’d look over his shoulder, expecting to see some unknown person with fiery eyes drilling a hole into his back. But I was his shadow, always there but never seen. Although hardly necessary, the staff also had plain instructions to watch him and his friends to make sure nothing got out of hand.

I wanted Nero to know why it was good to be good, to know of bad and what it was, constantly looking for examples to learn from. One day, a boy named Patrick, about twelve or so, dreamt himself there. He terrorized the girls, pulling down sweet pears and throwing them (his aim was good) and yanking the flowers out of the garden. The bad example I had waited for had come.

The next time Patrick dreamt himself there, I called Nero to me.

“Do you see that boy?” I asked. His appearance made him hard to miss. He had dyed his hair a dull, mossy green and had someone braid it into dozens of tiny plaits. His ear was more a decoration for the left side of his head than anything, covered with studs and rings of every shape. Dragons and sneering faces danced down the side of his right arm, even at his young age.

“Yes, Mama,” he said complacently, mouth set in a sweet half-smile. It pleased me to see that his mouth had not twitched in a superior smirk, as mine had. He had passed no judgment on Patrick from his appearance.

“I want you to watch him and learn from his mistakes,” I said. “Can you do that?”

“Yes, Mama.” His smile grew wider, happy with an easy way to gratify me.

From that request on, whenever Patrick dreamt himself there, Nero hovered nearby, watching him, studying his actions. Eventually, he approached him while he tore the pages out of a book in the library.

“Hello,” Nero said.

“Hello to you,” Patrick replied glibly. His carefree attitude seemed to catch Nero off-guard. After all, I had taught him to respect books and their value. Watching the wanton destruction of one disturbed him, and Patrick’s lightheartedness only made it worse.

“Why are you ripping the pages out of that book?” he asked a bit timidly. Fingers twisted themselves into liquid knots.

“Simple,” he replied. “I don’t like to read, and I see no point in reading about…the life cycle of the blue star tick. Do you want to read about the life cycle of the blue star tick?”
“Well, no,” he said honestly. “But I’m sure someone does. Why else would the author write it?”

“Who can say why adults do the things they do? But I can almost guarantee you no one here wants to read it. I am actually doing this place a favor by getting rid of boring stuff to make room for something more interesting. It has no practical place here.” His tone was pleasant.

“Well…”said Nero. Furrows deep as canals creased his smooth forehead. The more he thought about it, the more he seemed taken with Patrick’s juvenile logic.

“Take shoes, for example. Do you like wearing shoes? Wouldn’t you rather run around barefoot, feeling the grass beneath your heels and squishing dirt between your toes?”

He considered for a while, then said reluctantly, “Ye-e-es.”

“Right. And I’m sure if you asked around, nine out of ten kids here would agree. So I apply the same thought to this book. Why have it if no one wants it? I’m simply freeing up space for something more interesting, like I said.”

Nero thought this for a bit, then grinned and said, “I guess you’re right.”

From then on, my son shadowed the little swine, almost as I had followed him. He looked on as Patrick dug up earthworms to toss in the cook’s spaghetti, while the delinquent mouthed off to a little maid, as he unclipped just one corner of a sheet from the clothesline so one bit would get muddy – enough that it needed a second washing, but little enough so that it was twice as vexing to do it again. He sat close while Patrick hid up in the tree limbs and dropped acorns and apple cores on passing children. He watched but never took part. Patrick’s influence didn’t worry me much. His appearances became less and less frequent, and I knew by the time he reached age thirteen, they would stop altogether.

After three Patrick-free months, Nero came to me and asked where he had gone. When I truthfully answered that he wouldn’t be coming back, he asked me again in an aggravated voice. I tried explaining the complexity of it, which of course he didn’t understand. And then he did something he had never done before: he shouted at me and stormed off. He found his way through the staircases and passages only easily navigated by young children to his room and spent hours in bed, staring at pictures of animals in his books, but mostly staring out the window as leaves softly fell from the trees. When I went up to check up on him, he had torn out the pages that were strewn across the floor and scurried out the window, down the nearest tree, and had gone missing. I became frantic with worry. I immediately sent out a search parties of both adults and children. They eventually found him lying beneath a pine tree near a stream, barefoot, trailing his fingers in the clear water. He jumped up and ran off, swift and silent as a bird.

It only got worse as time went on. He’d sleep late in his room, leave to eat lunch alone in a corner, a collage of mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese which he had willed. He fiddled with his food, then headed outside to mope. He began to pull the girls’ hair and start fights with the boys. He’d spend days alone, lying under the same pine tree, fingers in the water, and always barefoot. He’d throw rocks at windows and answered back with impudent responses to anything anyone said. One day, though, he came to me with a solemn look in his eyes that reminded me of days before he had met Patrick.

“Why do I always stay the same? Why am I always like this when the other kids change and get taller?”

I leaned back and looked at him for awhile. The look on his face was almost laughable, like he really expected me to take him seriously, speak to him like I would an adult.

“Because, sweetheart,” I replied, “I wanted you to always be like this, a happy little boy.”

This, for some reason, seemed to irritate him. “Why?” His eyes glinted with a hardness I had never seen before; it was not my little Nero. My little Nero did not ask of his mother. “Why didn’t you ask me what I wanted?”

At that I had to laugh — I just couldn’t help it. “Nero, darling,” I said with a chuckle. “You don’t know what you want.”

His face became splotchy and he clenched his fists. “Maybe not then, but I do now! I want to grow up! I don’t want to be a kid forever! I’m tired of this place, tired of playing the same games, and I’m tired of you!”

With that he drew himself up and began to will himself older. “Nero!” In a change so rapid, so fueled by anger, his face arms, legs, and torso grew longer, his teeth more crooked, his brow more tired, his hair more sparse, and his eyes sadder. Delicate wrinkles strategically placed at the corner of his sagging eyes and mouth appeared. His nose was larger, beak-shaped, and his hands expanded to the size of small shovels. When it was over, a man of about thirty stood before me, gangly, weary, but triumphant. He screwed his face in an ugly grin.

“There, Mother. I did it. I’m a man now, and you can’t tell me what to do any more. When I want to go somewhere, I’m going to go, even if you don’t want me to. I’ll have my own friends and my own house and my own will and my own…” Nero floundered a bit, searching for a word. Not finding any, he began to chuckle awkwardly, then faced me and said, “The first thing I’m going to do is eat a pie, a whole pie, all by myself for dinner.”

He tried to will a pie to being. He closed his eyes slowly and luxuriously, and then opened them, expecting a pie to be in front of him. When it wasn’t, he tried again, and again, and again. Frustrated, he cried out and tried once more. He sank to his knees and cradled his head in his hands, weeping. He had used all his will in his transformation from a little boy to a grown man.

The weeping finally stopped, and he stared at the trees. Nero blinked, squinted, and yet couldn’t see the leaves as clearly as he once had. He reached up into his hair, once thick and glossy, but he could now feel it thin and grow brittle. He jerked his head down to look at his hands, and watched the moisture evaporate until he was left with shriveled, veined claws. The same had happened to the rest of him: face grown wrinkled, teeth yellowed and few. The tears began to flow again.

“Mama!” he sobbed. “Mama!”

I ran to his side, cradling his head in my lap, stroking the bald head and crooning quietly to the old man. Nero had drained himself completely breaking my mantle of eternal youth, but he hadn’t even penetrated the layer surrounding himself. He had broken the youth, but still he had eternal life — an eternity as this quivering old man that lay in my lap.