My Sylvia

No matter what you think at the end of this, don’t feel sorry for the old man.

Once I saw him scream at a child for scuffing his fine leather shoes while he brushed past amongst the throng of workers dragging themselves toward the roaring steel foundry at the center of town. I remember the white tracks that the young boy’s tears cut across his grimy cheeks as the old man shook him, raging about the vermin offspring of the city’s disenfranchised, the criminals and the hookers and the addicts. I half expected him to eat the boy alive.

Back then, they called him Old Saul, or, sometimes, The Ghoul. He was foul-tempered and bitter, known for cheating the poor out of the little money they had, and a true specter to behold: bloated and pale like a sallow amphibian preserved in formaldehyde. Everyone hated him.

And so, when he finally fell ill and started to die, not a single person in our small, pitiful city could be convinced to care for him, even though we desperately needed the money. It seemed no one had a reason good enough to ease The Ghoul’s final days. No one except for me.

I had her.

She was the only remaining blossom of golden days gone by.

For a shining sliver of years, before life knocked both of us to our knees, I held her in my arms. My Sylvia. Before I became caretaker to Old Saul, some friends once told me that they had seen her dancing on the poles at one of the shadowed, oily gentleman’s clubs in the city’s underbelly. That’s impossible, I had said. She’s married now.

“Oh, her husband knows,” the man next to me replied. “He doesn’t say anything because he likes the extra money. And I bet she likes the extra men!”

They all laughed, vulgar hyenas that they were.

Amid their snickering my mind fled back to an endless summertime too long past, all glowing and hazy at the edges. Back to her and the reservoir.

We used to make the 3-mile walk to the outskirts of the city when the heat beat mercilessly onto our neighborhood of cramped aluminum trailer homes. On those afternoons, my mother would kick me out so that she could drink her bootlegged gin in peace. She never had to tell me twice. I would run to get Sylvia, and on the days when I heard her father shouting from five trailers down, I knew before seeing her that she was already running toward me as well, wiping her eyes, thinking I couldn’t see.

How we used to whirl away from there, sometimes laughing and chattering, chasing the scant breezes toward the horizon, where our only relief waited and waved. Sometimes she remained completely silent during our trek, and I knew that those were the days her father had hit her. There were many such times.

The hours that followed when we finally made it to the reservoir were an eternity all their own. We would plunge into the water with near desperation, as if hurling ourselves from a burning building into the soothing, bottomless blue. Whenever I opened my eyes I saw her before me, her hair swirling all around her, playing in the beams of light that cut through the water’s wrinkled surface and illuminated our skin to remind us that, even then, we were beings made to live under the loving sun.

Later, when we lay stretched out on the concrete, I watched the moisture shining on her bare arms and shoulders, where the ever-present bruises stood stark in their purples and yellows, new and old. I counted all the freckles in between them while she played with my fingertips, stopping only to lift my hands to her face and press my palms against her cheek. We rarely spoke. Often we dozed off.

But once, after the sun had started to set and the air was filled with the scent of the dewy ground and the approaching dusk, she turned to me.

“David,” she whispered, “I’m never scared to fall asleep around you.”

“What?” I asked.

“I’m never scared to fall asleep when I’m with you. Everywhere else, I am.”

I didn’t know what to say. A roaring from deep in my core had drowned out my voice.

She looked back into my eyes laughed suddenly.

“You crybaby,” she chuckled, and jumped to her feet, pulling me up with her. “Let’s go back.”

So we did, and I wished the walk back would stretch for a hundred miles more, but time and space are stingy and cruel, and before I could catch my breath the trailers were looming in front of us and she was already walking away.

By now you must know that she didn’t choose me. After that summer her father hauled her off to live on the other side of town. The next year we graduated high school and were funneled into the same lives that everyone had where we were from; I became a worker at the foundry, she ended up waiting tables.

I didn’t see her for years after that, until one afternoon, when I looked up from pouring the white-hot steel and she was in front of me, a pale angel standing in the infernal red glow. She was looking for her husband.

“Who?” I asked.

“Yuri,” she repeated. “My husband. Don’t you work with him?”

I opened my mouth to reply but Yuri was already climbing down from the flimsy scaffolding that stood over the melting furnace. He nodded ‘hello’ to me and then they left together, hand in hand. I watched her until she was gone.

The other men’s laughter over the rumor that Sylvia had started stripping rang in my ears until, one night, I found myself inside the club where they said she worked, hoping that they had been lying about it all.

But then I saw her, through the chaotic dreamscape of flashing lights and cigarette smoke. She was waiting for her turn to dance, and for a moment we made eye contact before she tore her gaze from mine.

When she stepped on stage the light turned blue, and she began to twist and sway, and it played on her bare skin and dark hair and suddenly my heart burst into tears because for just an instant we were back underwater, where she used to love me.

I could only see one way of saving her. It was an unexpected chance, heaven-sent. It would never come again.

The next day, I went to care for The Ghoul.

I only had to endure him for two weeks.

Upon my arrival, I found him in his dark, sumptuous bedroom on a hospital bed beneath a nest of tubes. Although he looked shriveled and inert from afar, he woke up when I approached him and sneered in disgust. I ignored him and turned to check the surrounding medical contraptions.

In the same instant, something blunt and heavy smashed into the back of my head. I screamed and whirled around. Old Saul was wheezing with malicious laughter. On the floor by my feet was a glass paperweight.

“I always had good aim!” He cackled.

Enraged, I stumbled into his closet and seized four leather belts, then tied him down with them as my scalp began to bleed.

“As you know, I only came for one thing,” I growled. “Your money. Leave it all to me, and the belts come off.”

“Never.” He spat, his swollen gums flashing.

Still, as the days passed, I could see the pain of the restraints weakening his resolve. He managed to hold out until his last hours.

“Please,” he whispered when I came to check the tubes in his body. “I’m about to die.” Beneath the sound of his voice was an inhuman rattle.

“I’ll let you out once you’ve promised me everything you’ve got.”

“Fine, fine,” he replied amid a storm of hacks and coughs. “Go to my desk and get that black notebook and a pen.”

I complied, then untied his hands so he could write. He scribbled a few sentences onto the small pages, then threw the pen down.

I untied his legs and snatched up the notebook.

After leaving the room, I sank down onto the nearest couch to read the makeshift will. Old Saul’s death rattle continued through the wall.

The front page, in barely-legible handwriting, read:

I, Saul Pembroke, hereby bequeath the entire remainder of my estate, in the amount of $20,000, to David Reaper.

Signed,

Saul Pembroke.

I blinked, counting the zeros in the figure a second time. The rattling seemed to intensify. I counted them again. More rattling. I counted them again, and again, and again. It was only when the rattling stopped that I looked up.

I jumped to my feet and ran back into the bedroom.

“Saul, you filthy cheat!” I screamed, leaping onto his bed and shaking him violently by the shoulders.

But after a moment I realized that he was already dead.

All the same, I got the $20,000. I took the little black notebook to the court and they accepted it, and I collected from Saul’s estate at the close of that cloudy day.

On the way home, I stopped at the foundry. In the darkness it glowed the lurid crimson of hellfire. I looked down at my hands and saw that they were drenched in the red light, as if already stained with blood.

I stepped inside. It was empty, so I walked to the scaffolding above the melting furnace, where Yuri had been stationed for a repair project. Then I climbed up to the level directly above the furnace and undid the bracing clamps.

After that, it might as well have been a house of cards.

I waited for a few weeks after Yuri died in the scaffolding collapse before going to Sylvia. When I did come for her, she was dancing again, exposed and alone under the microscope of lust.

I stayed at the club until closing time, sitting at one of the back tables in the shadows. A little after 2 AM, she came out from backstage, fully clothed now in a threadbare black dress.

“Sylvia!” I called out.

She turned, startled.

I ran to her. She raised her haunted eyes to look at my face, saying nothing.

“Sylvia, let me walk you home.”

She nodded, and we set out into the cold. The whole way back, she never spoke, ever still the young girl rendered speechless by a blow.

It was only after we stood in front of her mouldering apartment building that she squeezed my hand and whispered, “thank you,” and started to go inside.

“Wait!” I shouted. “I wanted to tell you something.”

She stopped in the doorframe and turned to me. “Yes?”

“Sylvia, I’ve inherited some money. It’s not so much, but it’s enough to get out of here. I want to help you get out of here.”

Her expression remained blank. “You want to help me?”

“That’s all I ever wanted to do.”

A tiny, crooked smile flickered across her face, softening for a moment its wounded stiffness.

“There’s one condition though,” I continued, inhaling deeply. “We’ll have to go together. You’ll have to marry me.”

Her smile disappeared, overtaken by a grimace of horror and rage.

“How dare you!” She shrieked. “How dare you! Go to hell!!”

Then she slammed the building door behind her and disappeared.

But a few evenings later, I found her sitting on my doorstep. When she saw me, she started to cry.

“I changed my mind,” she choked. “I don’t have any choice.”

“I love you, Sylvia,” I said, and opened my arms.

She hesitated for a moment, but gave in.

Her voice came thick and muffled from where her face pressed into my shoulder. “Oh God, David, I’m so devastated.”

“I know,” I whispered. “I know.”