The Redemption of Marvin Fuster by Patrick Sean Lee (best affordable ebook reader TXT) 📕

at last, she turned on the radio and walked into the bathroom, tossing her robe onto a small ornate chair beneath the dressing table. She stopped abruptly at the edge of the sink and looked beyond it to the oval mirror. Her dark hair was strewn about on her head as though she had just climbed out of a boxing ring after twelve furious rounds, but her brown eyes were clear as crystal, and her skin was a soft bronze without a single blemish. She pushed her fingers through the tangled mess and remarked to the woman in the mirror.

“You’re a fright, Amy Alionello. Where in the daylights have you been?” Laughing under breath, she smiled at her reflection, and bared her teeth slightly.

“Hmm…you guys need a good cleaning and polishing.” 

But they did not. As with the rest of her body, they were perfectly placed and perfectly in balance, and it should have been no wonder to her why every man she encountered would die for her attention. She had never quite understood that crazy fact, thinking she lacked so much in physical beauty, resenting the stares and dropped jaws in a crowd. It was not so much the crude nature of men reacting to her, but rather the rawness of her beauty that demanded some measure of a response by anyone in her presence. John Sampson might be a fool, but not when it came to recognizing a true beauty when he saw one. It was a wonder he had maintained his equilibrium for as long as he had, working beside her everyday for the last three years.

Stepping over the rim of the tub she sneered at the thought of him. The endless invitations to go for a drink after the workday was finished. To his apartment in the sleek Tremont Towers. The little innuendos; the calculating look in his eyes.

Twenty minutes later she left the bathroom, dressed in front of the mirror outside, and then walked down the creaking hall floor to the kitchen for a light breakfast of grapefruit and yogurt before leaving for the office. At least the presence of Delilah would make the day tolerable. 

FOUR

The hospital room was dark that evening except for the glow of the monitors on the wall above Marvin’s head. Anselm had entered and stood beside him, not a fleeting vision colored light and dark, but solid, like a ship emerging from a thick fog bank. Not across the room by the windows, either, but close enough to reach down and touch the patient. The angel spoke.

 “Who are you?”

The voice awakened Marvin, and when he saw Anselm his bleary eyes blew wide open.  

“Ho-ly Shit!”

Grabbing the top of the sheet with both hands, he yanked it up over his nose, but stopped short of his eyes. He trembled as he gazed up.  The eyes of the creature—not two, but many, spinning in its face like spokes in a wheel! Oh yes, it had a nose, a narrow nose, Marvin could see, now that whatever it was was so near—and a mouth, or several it seemed, that shifted up and down in a peculiar, disarming way when it spoke. A broken, shifting image, like one from an Edison Kinetoscope.

“Who are you?” Anselm asked again.

“I…dunno’,” Marvin stammered. “A dead man I’m guessin’. You come to take me away?  Holy shit.”

Anselm leaned close to Marvin’s face and continued speaking. Marvin’s heart beat wildly as he listened, and after a moment he lost consciousness—but the words entered his bruised brain and stuck.   

She is here, and we are watching her…

She is waiting for you…

This is what you will do...

 

Marvin was released two days later, but not without exclamations of professional astonishment, and not without a strong suggestion to consult a psychiatrist. First off, his wound had healed completely.That in itself brought every neurosurgeon, orthopedic specialist, oncologist, gynecologist, ornithologist, nurse, priest, psychic, and patient on the ward, to examine him and scratch their heads. 

His continued ramblings about an angel brought in a team of shrinks who explained the miraculous healing in terms of  “…an extreme acceleration of the processes of organic repair due to hypnotic intervention.”

“I can assure you,” the hospital administrator answered, “no one here would resort to such quackery.”

“Munchausen Syndrome, then,” came the response from a bespectacled psychiatrist, a tiny man who hung far back in the crowd, and who had peeked out and raised his hand as though he were back in a classroom in Vienna.

“You idiot, I saw his brain! That was no exaggeration on his part,” said the head surgeon who had gently stuffed Marvin’s brain back into his fractured skull before calling out for staples and gauze that night he was brought in.

“Oh.”

“Whatever happened, he’s not leaving before he pays the four hundred thousand dollar bill,” exclaimed the hospital administrator.  Everyone except Marvin seemed to agree with that, all of them being medical professionals.

Marvin promised to try, and when they had all wandered off arguing amongst themselves, he dressed in his bloodstained rags and snuck out to return to the quiet and comfort of his pit beneath the dock. He felt very different, uncommonly happy, and very sleepy again.

 

                                  ***

 

“This is the woman?” Anselm asked Roget.

“Yes.”

They stood watching as Amy set the dripping glazed bowl into the wire holder atop the counter next to the sink. Through the small, south-facing window above the sink, a soft light poured in, brightening the edges of the aqua curtains and the tile counter top. A robin flitted to a perch on the feeder outside, twisted its head several times quickly, then flew away. She glanced over at where it had been, then gathered her purse from the table behind her, looped the strap over her shoulder, and left the apartment.

“More beautiful even than the image in his dreams.”

“Quite. As these creatures go, at least.”

“What do we know of her? Where did they meet?” Anselm asked.

“Don’t know yet. Inconsequential, at any rate, I think.” 

Roget told of her dreams, and of a family in a city east of Denver. Her income, her quiet life here, her anxiety of late concerning a boss. 

“The point is they’ve crossed paths, I’m certain of that, and now we have to twist them back toward that intersection. It’s remarkable, isn’t it?” Anselm said.

“What is that?”

“The very different worlds they inhabit.”

“Indeed. How is he?”

“Resting. Dreaming. Drawing a plan, though he doesn’t realize it yet. Stay close to her, my friend. I have some work to do while he regains his senses.”

“And his injury?”

“A distant memory.”

 

                                  ***

 

Marvin walked north from the hospital in his state of suspended mental animation, recalling the flitting vision of the creature in his room. Still, his driving impulse was to stop at the Piggly-Wiggly Market on Broadway and lift a pint of whiskey and a block of cheese, as he would no longer enjoy the meals catered to him three times each day. But, he did not. He continued on instead in the cloud of angelic images until he came to Colfax Avenue, the beginning of the downtown district proper, and there he turned west. Marvin stopped when he came to a small clothing boutique, its display window manned by fashionably dressed female mannequins. He peered in at them. They stared out, beyond him in blankness, as though he didn’t exist. He dropped his eyes to his stained tee shirt, then raised them again to the window. The reflection in the glass of passers-bye on the sidewalk behind him caused him to focus momentarily on those blurry images in movement. They turned their heads to a person as they went along, glancing over at him, and though he could not read the expressions on their faces, he knew what they were certainly thinking. 

He turned in embarrassment and icy envy to look, pulling the trench coat shut in order to cover the dried blood on his shirt. Their numbers seemed to swell suddenly.

A city bus rumbled up to the curb and stopped, releasing a cloud of noxious diesel exhaust. The doors slid open with a hiss, and out came more men and women dressed in suits and skirts. Many of them carried briefcases; all of them gave him a quick, acid glance, before moving on in the crowd.

She came into view among the pedestrians, this woman. Walking westward.

She was young, and strikingly beautiful, with shining auburn hair, and eyes that seemed to rival the depth of oceans in the fall of shadows beneath her bangs. She was on her way to work also, he knew well enough. And he knew exactly who she was. 

It was Amy. 

She had an expensive looking purse dangling over her right shoulder. A white blouse and a black skirt hemmed mid-thigh. Low, black patent heels that clicked with a muted sound on the concrete as she hurried by. 

She glanced quickly at him and seemed to begin a tiny smile before turning her head back and continuing on without losing stride. Several steps later she hesitated and glanced back, as though she’d had second thoughts, but then changed her mind and slipped away in the crowd.

He watched her disappear, frozen in shock, embarrassed further by how he looked, confused by the tiny smile she had offered him. Marvin stood immobile and flexed his fingers, the way men do when several conflicting impulses strike at the same instant.

Run to her!

Stay, look at yourself.

Just go!

No.

Couldn’t have been her.  Couldn’t have been.  Go home.

RUN to her!  ‘She is here, and she is waiting…’

No.

He went home and eased himself through the opening near a clump of bushes at the end of the dock. He crawled in despair to his dusty pit, rolled into it, and sleep quickly overtook him.

     

The grace worked inexorably inside the old man, staving off the effects of impending death set to motion by his own hand, magnified in its relentless march over the past ten years, culminating in his dive out of the dumpster. But the real healing would come later, if it came at all. And then only if the suggestion working in his brain was powerful enough to push back the tide pressing against his shaky resolve. He would sleep for two days straight, a single name resounding in his head, driven by a variation of the dream playing and replaying itself in a loop. Beside a beautiful woman on a path climbing a hill—a flight through a crystalline sky above a calm sea near dusk, with a figure soaring away from him into a bank of tangerine bottomed clouds. 

Amy.

FIVE