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

The days passed, and finally Marvin woke. His eyes snapped open as though he’d been blissfully dozing in a bell tower until the acolyte gave the rope a mighty yank.

The sun had just risen. The air was still cool. He had no idea what had happened over the intervening days of light and dark and noise and silence, but he knew—he instinctively knew exactly what he needed to do this morning. It was as if he had stumbled out of delirium into a cul de sac of certainty. He did not recall the unending series of dreams, now—only snippets and endings—but something drove him to find the woman who had passed by him on the street farther uptown days earlier—the woman who was the dream, but was not. 

He had only an inkling of the past week’s happenings. What was real and what was only a very real dream. What was real, entirely real, was the near-insane compulsion to simply see her again, this woman whose name kept throbbing in his consciousness like an exasperated, beating heart; who was connected to him in some mysterious way.

Marvin glanced at his fingers, holding them up before his face. The same as last night, last week, last month. He ran them across the flesh of his face. A heavier growth of whiskers, but the skin was still tender, dry, even ulcerated on his sunken cheeks and high, wrinkled forehead. His coat was tangled around his body in the pit. His shoes still had holes in the toes, and he was sure his feet stank.

He was certain what he needed to do.

He wanted to pray to a God he didn’t believe in.  Say thank you—say something—but he was equally certain no one was really out there to receive it. It would be as effective to thank a cloud or a fire hydrant.

Marvin crawled back out from underneath his dock and began the journey uptown to Colfax Avenue. He liked the feel of the cobbled pavement beneath his feet. The emptiness of the city before the gun fired. It was like walking inside a Gothic cathedral of grand proportions. These streets were so quiet at this hour, and suggested amazing things to him as he walked. At times—few and far between, and distant in his memory—he had felt moments like this.  Moments of euphoria. So it was now, only different.  More…intimate, the word hit him. It reached to a spot deeper in the soul he couldn’t believe in. The world had stopped and begun to spin in the opposite direction, and for all he knew, the sun was laughing, and fixing to set in the east. Marvin was happy, something he hadn’t been for longer than he could remember.

On a whim, he decided to take his shoes off and throw them into the first trashcan he came to. The cruddy socks as well. His trench coat, his bloodstained tee shirt, his pants and underwear. His skin. 

But, that would be crazy.

I could no way throw my skin away.

Marvin drew near the financial district—beneath the shadows of skyscrapers with their skins of polished granite and wealth. He spied an open-topped trash can set in an aggregate container. He sat down on the curb next to it and pulled the tennis shoes and socks off, then rose and pitched them in. Across the broad sidewalk the mannequins of the fashionable women’s clothing boutique caught his eye, staring out at the street again, their arms and hands and fingers locked in those unnatural poses. They wore the same ensembles; immobile, eyes and lips locked in a plastic beauty foreign to emotion or change. Beautiful in a curiously lifeless way. He walked across the sidewalk and peered in. What would these elegant, thin beings look like when they got to his age, Marvin wondered? Would their skin be a landslide, or would their creator have stretched the polymers to make them look like ancient teenagers, until a newer generation consigned them to a dusty warehouse, or the dump? Always youthful, always smiling enigmatically—but never quite.

How do I get to you Amy? How do I jump back over the years?

His eyes changed focus. The mannequins blurred. The dark reflection of Marvin the indigent peered back at him in the glass, and spoke.

I am here, and I am waiting…

What…what?

Imagination. Begin there…

There, in the pupils of his eyes he saw someone—some thing—dancing into view through a fog, garbed in a dress of iridescent light. And then she swirled away, followed on her heels by another and another and another, across a stage that had grown blood red. He could not conceive what this might be. It was as though he were looking through the glass, the mannequins, the wall behind them, into another dimension of the universe filled with twirling spirals.

“Where’s your shoes, Mac?”

Marvin awoke and jerked his head to the right. A cop stood behind him a step, legs spread slightly, practiced. The enemy. His hand rested almost casually on the baton in his polished, black utility belt. Unlike the mannequins, the cop’s eyes were locked on his, focused, narrowed, and very much alive.

“I took ‘em off and threw ‘em away,” Marvin answered.

“Why.”

“They stunk.”

The cop waited a moment, glaring. Marvin stood his ground.  He’d been here before.  Talking to a light pole, rummaging through trash, panhandling, peeing on a tree on the Capitol grounds when the enemy suddenly descended on him out of nowhere. This morning he wasn’t drunk, scavenging, or peeing in public.

“What’re you doing here?”

“Lookin’ in this window at the dummies.”

Another moment of silence ensued, a definite statement without words, and then the cop continued. 

“Why? Planning to buy some clothes for your girlfriend?”  He said this with a mocking tone. Marvin didn’t wince. 

Behind him in the street the black and white stood with the engine running and its light spinning slowly.  How had he missed its arrival? A middle-aged man with neatly trimmed, graying hair carrying a briefcase slowed as he passed the bum being rousted, then went about his business.

“Nope. I’m gonna’ look like one of ‘em, ‘cept my eyes’ll have some life in ‘em. 

“I’m gonna’ reverse my age.”

This addendum, coming from nowhere, shocked himself as much as it amused the cop and made him snicker. Here stood a bum who had been staring into a window, barefoot, dressed in a filthy trench coat. He wasn’t swaying, true, but he was old, most likely filled with rotgut, and was obviously nuts. His brain was a soft-boiled egg. The officer wondered whether to take him in and let the drunk tank deal with him for a few hours, or just move him on.

Marvin wondered the same thing.

“You been drinking?” the cop asked almost rhetorically.

“No sir.”

“Where’s your I.D.?”

“Don’t have one. What for? Don’t drive, don’t have no bank account. Don’t need no I.D.”

“Yeah, you do as a matter of fact. Sober your ass up and go get one. Get out of here. Don’t let me catch you hanging around here again. Go get some help.” He raised the hand that had been resting on the baton and motioned.

“Move it.”

“Okay,” Marvin said.  “But I ain’t drunk.” He turned and started off in the direction of the park across the street.

“Not that way,” the cop ordered. Marvin stopped and turned to him.

“The Salvation Army is a coupla’ blocks down. That’s where I’m goin’,” he lied. “‘Sides, it’s a free country and I can go any goddamned where I like.”

That might be true, but the cop saw it differently. He un-holstered his baton and took a step toward Marvin.

“And I can beat the living shit out of you in this free country and nobody’ll give a damn! I oughta’ run you in, you crazy old fuck.”

“Run this in,” Marvin said, raising his middle finger. 

His legs felt good. Perfect, as a matter of fact. Sprinter’s legs. He leapt across the gutter, skirted the rear end of the squad car, and aimed for the expanse of Civic Center Park across the street. Even with ears clouded by wax as thick as a church candle, he could hear the rattle of the cop’s gear and the thump of his first footsteps on the concrete behind him.

Lord Almighty! What’d I say that for? Somebody help me!

Someone did.

Marvin missed the front bumper of a truck rumbling up the street by a hair. The cop didn’t. He was forced to stop when the driver slammed on the brakes, sending a cloud of smoke out from beneath the tires. Marvin leaned forward and shifted into a ragged 3rd. Sprinter’s legs or not, he was only good for the fifty yard dash before his lungs began to give out on him. He slowed and glanced over his shoulder. The truck was resting there. The driver had opened the door and was standing on the running board, the top of his head visible over the cab. He was saying something excitedly to the cop standing out of view. Precious seconds that Marvin didn’t waste. He pushed himself once again, gasping for breath. It felt like someone had grabbed hold of his shitty pants and was propelling him onward, away from danger, but also away from the street she would walk down in less than two hours.

He stopped.

Maribeth Harris, the governor’s daughter, twenty-one come September, five-four, maybe five, blonde, eccentric, brilliant but too young to know it, a lover of lost or hopeless causes, beautiful in a James Dean sort of way, and a terrible driver. Someone Anselm could make use of in his two times two equals ten method of calculation with these beings.

Angels are no smarter than men or women—simply more obedient, less distracted, and much better traveled.

He’s going to have to vacate the underside of that dock. But, where should I put him? Have him put himself? The rescue missions are no good, he’d wind up killing someone.

Anselm sat deep in thought atop a stone bench. The bench stood amidst a bed of dazzling, colorful flowers running alongside the narrow asphalt road winding through Cheesman Park, a few blocks to the east of the downtown area.  It was nine-fifteen in the morning. A Colorado morning, a Denver morning that was impossibly exquisite—resting as the city did just below the ceiling of the world like a pearl in a silver mount.

Marvin was sleeping soundly, with a spike holding him securely down. Roget had Amy’s hand in his, even if she was unaware of it. The situation was two-thirds under control, but where to put Marvin? Where might he be planted that he could truly blossom?

A sparrow with a worm in its mouth shot in a blur from the sky and perched on Anselm’s knee, though in the physical world his tiny claws clung firmly to thin air—six inches above the cool stone surface of the bench. The little creature rested for a moment and studied him, offering the angel, perhaps, a piece of her chicks’ breakfast with a quick twist of her head that made the worm’s body whiplash. No? She whisked away again toward her nest in an elm thirty feet away, leaving the angel to sit quietly, considering Marvin’s housing