Promise

All told, the weather had threatened to break for days and now was breaking, and everywhere the stiff air cracked under the hoarse crow of thunder. The breeze which spent the afternoon aimlessly harassing the fresh-fallen leaves on the sidewalks of Georgetown had lost itself sometime in the early evening. Shadow lighted quickly upon the flat-topped roofs as the day surrendered to a mire of dense blue cloud. Night was stretching down upon the Key Bridge.

Near the middle of the bridge, a man gazed blankly over the top of the mint-green railings into the far trees. He gripped the bars with two stiff hands and hummed to himself an old Irish tune, while the boathouse below conducted the thick syrup of the Potomac eastward.

            At this man’s back, another figure passed. It was a boy, a boy in his twenties, whose long limbs were engaged in a slouch, dragging his feet along the sidewalk. In passing, the boy caught the close of the man’s tune and, as he too came to rest at the railing, succeeded in recalling its melody, but not where he had first heard it; he decided only that the old notes made him miss the rain. In that same arbitrariness of thought he plucked the half-smoked cigarette from the corner of his mouth and tossed it over the side.

            Having done so, he checked his phone for the time and was surprised to find it had been twenty minutes since he left the bar. It would be another ten, he thought, before he could make it back up Wisconsin Avenue, to where he knew awaited him the riotous indignance of his drinking mates. Still, he did not care to leave the bridge just yet.

“And it’s gonna be a miracle if you pass,” said Jack, his voice raised above the din of the crowded bar.

            “And why shouldn’t I pass?” cried Abel, in mock appal. 

            “Because you didn’t the answer the question.”

            “What the hell do you think I spent two hours writing? I wasn’t proving fucking Fermat, I wasn’t drawing naked women.”

“You answered the question with what you already knew, not what they were asking for – what would have known if you studied,” said Jack. His face wound up in satisfaction. “You gave the same legal advice to the owner of a comic book store as you would to the head of IBM.”

            “Principles, my learned friend, principles – a lawyer hangs his hat on his principles.”

            “And you hang yours…” came the sly interpose from Vinny, the boy from on the bridge.

            “Wherever I can, Vinny, you slug – wherever I can.”

            “The prosecution rests,” said Jack, collecting in his thick-fingered hands, a wrestler’s hands, the empty glasses. “My round.”

“So these are the problems of the law,” said Abel, turning his shoulders to face Vinny while Jack went to the bar. “How fare things in the kingdom of the written word?”

            “Well, they’re faring. It seems everyone is writing but me,” said Vinny.

            “You’re foreign, you get a break for the language barrier.” The two of them grinned. “But you looked like you had your damn eyes about crossed over at that paper today when we came in.” Abel had his own way of making light of things. “What’s scratching your head?”

            “It’s a paper on Hardy – the modern woman in Jude the Obscure,” said Vinny, somewhat ironically; it was not lost on him the fact that he had come all the way to America only to study Thomas Hardy. And it was true: the paper was not playing ball. Vinny knew Hardy well, had studied him at school, but he was now being pushed by the blunt expectation of his professor to delve deeper. Arabella and Sue Bridehead were elusive. Their contours shifted amorphously, and Vinny could not place down the pins from which a thread could be drawn to modernism; his focus languished in the air like a helicopter, rotor chattering, unable to land amid the thick brush of procrastination. So, he had gone out to drink and in doing so get drunk, which is what he was doing.

            “You oughta explain the whole thing to Jack, he looks like he’s in search for the modern woman right now,” said Abel, nodding towards his friend at the bar who had his ear over the shoulder of a tawny-haired girl. “So what makes Jude so obscure?”

            “He gets suckered by school and suckered by drink,” Vinny recounted, matter-of-factly. 

            “Hardy never went to Georgetown, huh?”

            “And his son kills his other kids and then himself.”

            “Oh. Tough break.” Abel hesitated. “And you can’t find anything to write about in all that?”

Vinny cocked his head and grimaced flatly. “Not yet.”

“I have faith. If I have faith in anyone, it’s you.” Abel hesitated for a moment. “Though I should say it’s the kid that’s the obscure, not the guy.”

            He was cut off abruptly by Jack, returning with the three full glasses of beer, knocking at chairs and tables as he came. “I’ll tell you what’s obscure. A girl from Tinder I hooked up with, two weeks ago. She’s at the bar, her date’s at the restroom.” He pronounced restroom like a punchline. “And she starts laying it on to me, thick like.”

            “The modern woman,” said Abel. Vinny smirked. 

Jack ignored him. “Can you believe that?”

            “Hardly at all,” said Vinny. He looked at the fresh pint of beer and thought still of the paper. He felt his stomach turn. “I’m gonna grab a smoke,” he said. “Back in a minute.”

Everyone had always figured to Vinny to be someone. That’s what he knew as he walked down the sidewalks filled with eaters and drinkers. He had to be someone; it was all there was. Was it him? Or, rather, hadn’t it been a kind of determinism, accrued like sand grains in an hourglass; in every look from a teacher when they handed back a marked paper; in each remark from his parents on how promptly he picked out the threads of a book or movie? In each of these, wasn’t there a promise? The scholarship to Georgetown was only one in a long line of these promises – more pronounced, but still fitting neatly in the sequence of steps to an untold apotheosis. Good graces saved him from outright egotism, but this imparted notion of prospect formed the transom of his young life. 

All this was on the outside. It did not satiate, nor did it halt the fear that spun and spun in his stomach like a whirlpool and made him sick. Its uneven weight threatened to pull him under. All this because Vinny knew he lacked inspiration and he lacked determination: what was required was not there and he did not have the will to create it. This realisation came to him often, in charged attacks, and it lent itself to a reckless abandon; he felt like a boy on a riverbank, awaiting baptism, but seeing only in the green water the frothy clutch of a monster. An insane weight came down on his head.

By now he had come to the junction on the north side of the Key Bridge. Rather thoughtlessly, he crossed the parading gleam of the traffic. He stubbed out a cigarette butt on the sidewalk and lit another. He moved slowly and silently as his mind ground under pressure. He passed the whistling man, and came to a stop in the middle of the bridge.

Leaning over the side, he recognised in the night Potomac something which he longed for, something which could not be impoverished by human emotion nor human apathy and which knows no dying. He had an idea to write a collection of stories and feature in each of them a river. He would paint the river in only tentative flourishes. In later years, they would dedicate entire seminars – Rivers in the Stories of Scott – to his rivers and their elusive meaning. There would be no firm conclusion, but, perhaps, the brightest might grasp in the writing that immortal rhythm which he felt below his feet now – the only thing he had intended to write at all.  

The daydream was destroyed by thunder. The sky in the west had snarled into a delirious blue maw. Clouds towered as if over Golgotha, their layers warped like the wings of an old flyer by wild flashes of silent lightning. The other man on the bridge was gone; Vinny stood alone. 

A plane flew over his head. It was rising, rising out towards the unending continent of America; its undercarriage grinned with the face of a manta ray. Vinny watched it take to the sky with anguish. It rolled unsteadily. Another wild crack of lightning, wilder than the others, warned the plane of its path. It fired an amber cannon shot behind the clouds.

Something came over Vinny. He stirred, his eyes fixed to the plane; his hands had gripped the railings themselves. All was quiet on the bridge, but mad in the night. In truth, he was longing and longing for communion, communion with a power that could fulfil the promise he could not. As he watched that plane, he thought, “If I see it, now, struck out of the sky, it will mean something. I can be someone then. Only then. Then I’ll know. Let that plane fall out of the sky. Let it fall.” He didn’t think to care about the price. Like a gargoyle, he watched it rise and continue rising until it slipped through the cloud. Its light remained a second longer, then disappeared too. 

The whole sky lit up. There was no sound – just that awful red glare from behind the clouds, as if they themselves had caught fire. Deep in the flame, a black spot was falling. The darkness dropped again.

The traffic was alive behind him. It was the first thing he felt. He stepped back from the railing, the cobwebs parting from his shirt. The wind had returned to blow scraps of leaves into the air. Georgetown was only a shadow now, the clock of the Car Barn hanging like a blood moon. Vinny sensed the rhythm of his heart; the weight hitherto upon his soul had gone. He stared into the blazing red and white headlights until the wind struck from its post and bid him: “Move.”

He came back to the bar and sat down over his flat beer. 

“They put me on the boat and they took away me ‘K’,” Abel was exclaiming.

“They didn’t put you on the boat, and they didn’t take away your ‘K’,” said Jack. “It was your great grand-daddy all that happened to. You, however, are American-Greek and have always been Caldis.”

“Greek-American. And I might be Caldis, but they still took my ‘K’.” And now they noticed their friend, returned and entirely at ease in his seat.

“Vinny, who the hell did you bump into?”