The Blue Hour

Thirty-Eight

To his authentic horror, Matamoros Colesceau glanced at the TV in his living room to see his mother making her way through the crowd toward his door.

He watched her barrel through the demonstrators. She threw one arm up to cover her face and peered over it like a leper from a cave. The mob parted for her.

She was dressed, as always, in her long loose black skirt and black v-necked shawl. The lapels of the shawl were embroidered with white crosses of her own design, but the effect was far more pagan than Christian. From any kind of distance the crosses looked like rows of teeth closing in on her throat. She was a strong woman, thick as a lumberjack. Her face was round and white. Her mouth was open even when she wasn’t speaking, the heavy, dry lips parted over posts of misshapen teeth that were separated by spaces suggesting violence. She wore the thick oval sunglasses favored by dictators and a black knit babushka over her head. Even to Colesceau she looked like the witch in some fairy tale illustrated with woodcuts. He opened the door and let her in.

“Moros, I am saddened and furious.”

“I am, too, Mother.”

She looked at him. Even after twenty-six years his first instinct on being close to his mother was to run.

She took his wrists and pulled him down so he could kiss her. He did. He could smell the breath from her never-closed mouth: a red American mouthwash she used by the gallon.

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

“I was ashamed.”

“They are the ones who should be ashamed.”

“They’re not ashamed of anything. That’s why I’ve become so important to them. What could you have done?”

“Done? I could have helped the only blood I have left on earth. Why, the television, it says you have no job, and no place to live in just a few weeks. And still, you don’t call or write me?”

Colesceau stepped back a little and sighed. “Thanks for coming.”

“How do you live with that noise outside?”

“It stops at nine.”

“They would crucify you if they had the courage.”

“And the hammers.”

“Make me some tea. I’m going to sit here where it’s cool and think about this situation. There must be a way we can overcome it.”

Colesceau made the tea. He brought it out to her.

Helena was watching “Rape Watch: Irvine.”

“Are you on the TV all day?”

“They broadcast live when I go outside for any reason. Or when someone visits. Yesterday, law enforcement. Now you.”

“What are they saying about the children?”

“They’re demanding a safe neighborhood for them.”

“But you love children.”

“True.”

“And if you had ever shown interest in a Romanian girl, she would have given children to you, like I gave you to your father.”

References to his mother in childbirth disgusted him. His father was weak, womanly and traitorous. Matamoros was ashamed to be sired by him. Which was why he had taken his mother’s maiden name when he came to the states. He tried to think of something pleasant, always difficult in the presence of Helena. “You’ve told me that a thousand times, Mother.”

“Instead of the French or Italian girls in Bucharest. Instead of the German girls in the magazines. Instead of the American girls in California.”

“I know your opinions.” Certainly, he did. She’d been opining about his prospective mate for twenty years or so. Her words had always made him sad and edgy and angry. At first it was because he didn’t really understand them. Later, because he knew she was right.

“You will never attract an American woman like you desire.”

“This isn’t the time to discuss it.”

“It’s the reason for all that’s happened. Your own type, Moros. Your own level. What is similar and harmonious. A hummingbird for a hummingbird. A sow for a hog. Beautiful and educated American women for beautiful and educated American men. For you, a simple Romanian peasant girl. Someone like me.”

“You horrify me, Mother,” he said softly. “I love you, but you always have.”

When she forced him to sleep in her bed after the death of his father, Colesceau had begun to truly understand why his mother so adamantly choked his desires for other women. He began to understand this while he lay in her bed the very night his father was shot to death by the state police, lay still and silent and in considerable pain as she sobbed and worked the cooling herbal poultice over the stitched fang holes that the attack dogs had left all over his body. Her desire was easy for him to feel. It entered him through her fingers, arcing down into him like electricity in slow motion. It never left. He could never really make it leave.

Now, years later, he considered killing her just to stop her damning words, but there was the money she gave him, the rent she paid, the vehicles she financed for him, the savings and checking accounts she helped him maintain, the lawyers and doctors she hired and fired like maids.

“I believe I have a solution for our immediate problems, Moros. You will move in with me. We can transport you in a private way, and no one will know you are with me.”

He just looked at her, the brown and broken teeth rising from her gums.

“What do you think of that, Moros?”

“No.”

“Do you have a better solution?”

“I’ll be all right here, Mother. I’ll finish out my lease here, that’s twenty-five days. Then I’ll find another place to live. It’s not impossible. It’s a free country.”

“Not for sexual perverts, it isn’t.”

“I’m not a sexual pervert. And I’m not moving in with you. I’m not going anywhere. This is my home.”

“Then I’ll move in here. And I will hear no argument about that, if you expect to continue your allowances. No arguments from you, Moros. But, more tea. And turn up the TV.”

He picked up the remote and pressed the button. As the “Volume” bar rose up one side of the screen, hatred rose up in his heart. It was like water jumping to a boil. But it was a soft, compromised hatred, not one that would ever spur him to action. It frustrated him so much that he couldn’t just shut her up and get it all over with. Then start to rebuild his life from the ground up, clean slate, American Dream and all that: no Depo-Provera, no shrill neighbors, no Helena to tell him he should aspire only to women as ugly as her.

“Who is this woman on the screen, Moros?”

He looked. “I don’t know.”

His mother turned her white round face toward him and Colesceau knew she was studying him through her sunglasses.

“Yet she is a neighbor?”

“You see her there, staring at my front door — what else could she be?”

“You desire her.”

“No, not really.”

“They say her name is Trudy Powers. You know her, don’t you?”

“She’s lived here longer than I have.”

Colesceau took Helena’s cup back to the kitchen, poured some fresh tea. What he hated most about her was the way she knew what he was thinking when it came to women. She always knew the ones he’d like, ever since he was just a boy. He looked out to the living room at her, his black-shrouded harridan of a mother with the dictator’s sunglasses, the babushka and brown, broken teeth. His heart was pounding heavy and hard, like an idling Harley. But his muscles felt loose and strong, better than they’d felt in years.

Over one week without a hormone injection, he i thought. After three years of it you don’t need any more. And if you do, one more’s not going to do you any good at all.

Here I am, he thought, caught in another drastic moment. But it felt like he was getting stronger every minute.

Then the doorbell rang. He looked to the TV screen to identify his new torment. He could feel the soft hatred still inside, the swirl of it through his blood and nerves. But instead of more cops, or reporters or something wretched like his mother, there was something wonderful now standing on his porch, asking that her ring be answered. She had her purse slung over her shoulder and something flat and heavy in one hand.

Trudy rang the doorbell again and Colesceau smiled, turning toward the entryway.

But Helena was already there, swinging open the door. Colesceau looked past the black-shawled shoulder of his mother to see the look of genuine fright on Trudy’s face as she smiled at Helena. Tried to smile, was more like it.

“May I come in for just a moment?”

“Only for just a moment.”

“You must be Mrs. Colesceau. I absolutely love the eggs you decorate.”

Helena turned to look back at him, and Colesceau knew she was trying to understand how Trudy Powers knew about her eggs. Colesceau knew that behind the black plastic of her sunglasses her little pig eyes were narrow, suspicious and uncertain.

She turned away from him and back to Trudy Powers. “It is an art I have practiced for many years. I’ve never felt worthy of its tradition.”

“I’m no expert on the tradition, Mrs. Colesceau, but the eggs are beautiful.”

Colesceau smiled and bowed to Trudy very slightly. In the afternoon light that came through the still-open door Trudy Powers looked like a goddess. She was radiant, beautiful and filled with power. The dust rising in the sunlight around her was gold. Her skin and her hair and her thoughts were gold. Beside her, Helena seemed like one of those black holes they always talked about on the Discovery Channel, a place of hungry nothingness that ate solar systems like appetizers.

“Miss Powers,” he said, bowing again.

“I’m concerned that they did the wrong thing in demonstrating at the Parole Board building today. I’m really sorry they did that, and I advised them it was wrong. I apologize for what they’ve done. I made you a pie.”

Helena turned away and waddled into the living room. Colesceau extended his arm toward the kitchen, encouraging Trudy to go in ahead of him. She smiled on her way past him, a nervous smile. “Can I set it here on the counter?”

“That’s fine. It was kind of you.”

She put the pie on the counter, then looked at him. She was nervous but she didn’t back away. He could tell it took resolve. But she seemed convinced that she was animated, or at least endorsed, by a higher power than herself. God’s little errand girl, he thought, placating the evil monster.

“How nice to have your mother here.”

“Oh, very.” Colesceau felt a swirl of things just then: hatred, attraction, frustration, power. And a light, fizzing sensation down in the fleshy end of himself.

“Mine died when I was young.”

“But you still are young.”

“I’m thirty-four. You’re just twenty-six, aren’t you?”

“Miss Powers, I feel a hundred. At least.”

“After all you’ve gone through, it’s understandable.”

“I’ve sinned. But it was a long time ago. And I have honored the promise I made you. My behavior has been excellent I in all ways.”

Colesceau thought he heard his mother grunt from the living room, but it could have just been the TV, or the blood rushing against his eardrums.

“It’s good you can acknowledge your sins.”

“It’s easy when they’re as large as mine.”

“Paul was the great sinner, until his conversion. The farther you have fallen, the higher you can rise.”

He pursed his lips and looked down. It was a look of contrition he’d practiced for years on Holtz. “What’s inside the pie?”

“Apples. Organic apples. I hope you like apple pie.”

“Oh, powerfully.”

“Mr. Col... Moros. I brought you something else. I hope you don’t think it’s presumptuous or something, but I just thought, from some of the things you’ve said, that you’d understand it.”

“I understand your kindness.”

“It’s about a kindness far greater than my own.”

She opened the flap of the purse, leaving it over her shoulder. Out came the black book he fully expected to see. He could see a sheet of folded paper marking a place about halfway through. Trudy set the Bible on the counter next to the pie.

“It’s yours to keep.”

“I feel it could ignite in my hands.”

“Don’t underestimate the power of forgiveness.”

He stepped forward and set his hand on the cover. He smiled at her, then looked down again.

“Well, I should go. Maybe we can talk again.”

“I would like that very much.”

She smiled — all of life and goodness was contained in that smile — and hiked up the purse strap. He could see her breasts move under the blouse. Soft and large, still fairly high. She walked by him, then stopped behind Helena.

“Mrs. Colesceau, it was nice to meet you.”

“Moros does not need the company of American women. You confuse him. You cost him his testicles.”

She pronounced it with a long “e” at the end, so it sounded like a Greek philosopher. Testiclese. Colesceau winced. Even though Trudy Powers knew what he had gone through, knew the rough outlines of it, anyway, when his mother said that word it brought a fresh sense of shame to him.

“God can give them back,” said Trudy.

“And he hates apples.”

“Then give the pie to someone who doesn’t.”

Trudy looked at Colesceau and walked out.

He read the note left in the Bible by Trudy Powers. It was written in graceful, feminine script, with the eyes dotted by circles that looked like happy balloons:

Helena went out for dinner groceries around six, promising him a good meal. She came back with cube steaks — the kind with the gristle like rubber bands, frozen peas, a coconut custard pie with a clear plastic lid and two half gallons of generic vodka. He watched her approach his apartment home on TV again, shopping bags in one hand and the other held in front of her like a battering ram as the neighbors and reporters converged.

Dinner was a tribulation he thought would never end, and through it Colesceau could feel his shame turning into anger, his anger into rage, his rage into calm, his calm into hatred.

“Moros, it hurts me when a woman like that neighbor steps into your home. The home I pay for.”

It was after dinner, time for dessert but still before nine, so the chanting outside was going strong. Some of the Parole Board demonstrators had joined the neighborhood demonstrators, so it looked like twice as many of them. The increased numbers had brought more media, too — there were three network vans outside, plus some local L.A. stations, and some whose call letters Colesceau didn’t even recognize. Where was WJKN, anyway?

Helena drank deeply from her tumbler. Colesceau heard her slurp. He took another long draw from his own glass — the generic vodka smelled just like the swabs that Holtz’s fat nurse used to wipe his arm before she plunged the needle in.

“It was the first time Trudy Powers has ever been in here,” he said.

On screen he saw Lauren Diamond and Sergeant Merci Rayborn, lead Sheriff’s investigator in the Purse Snatcher investigation. He’d forgotten about her in all of this;

But at the sound of his own voice saying Trudy’s name — or was it at the sight of Merci on his TV–Colesceau felt his desire stir. Actually felt a nudge against the forearm lying across his lap. He breathed deeply.

... the Purse Snatcher investigation is moving ahead on a number of fronts right now...

“She’s an impudent, self-righteous whore.”

“She means well.”

We were considering Veronica Stevens of Santa Ana to be the Purse Snatcher’s third victim until we discovered...

Helena sighed hugely. She sat her bulk back into the couch and sighed again. She slurped down some more vodka. “Do you miss Romania, Moros?”

“Not at all.”

“I love America, too. But sometimes I remember the good things about home. I miss them.”

“Name me one good thing about home, Mother.”

“Oh, I remember the springtime in Tirgu Ocna. The sunrise over the Danube. The beach at Constanta in August.”

“They mean nothing to me.”

... uie try not to make predictions like that...

“More vodka, Moros.”

In the kitchen Colesceau poured his mother fresh vodka. He’d heard her nostalgic blubbering before. Another drink or two and she’d tell him about her beautiful lover from Matamoros, Mexico, a slender Mexican idealist, poet and photographer who had seduced her as a young woman. Colesceau’s namesake. The whole story sickened him.

After putting a handful of ice into her glass, he popped the roll of paper towels off its holder and tilted out the ice pick. Cold. He put it in his right front trouser pocket, tip up.

Back in the living room he gave Helena the glass, looking at her through the periphery of his vision because it was too much to look directly at her. He felt the bile rise in his guts. He sat down and saw Merci Rayborn still on the TV.

...he’s an animal and a coward, picking on unarmed, defenseless, unsuspecting women...

She looks better on TV than in person, thought Colesceau. Just a little heavier. Softer in the eyes and face. His penis felt like it was crawling.

“I miss Voronet,” said Helena. “The outdoor frescoes. You know, Moros, the ones they painted on the outside walls of the churches, because the poor people were considered too unclean to enter the church. It was like TV for the poor, although the pictures didn’t move.”

“I remember the frescoes. They’re one of the few things about Romania I liked.”

“Moros, remember ‘Soul Taking’ at the Moldovita church? What an unforgettable thing, to see that fresco, to actually feel what the artist felt. People were closer to God in those days. There is no doubt about this.”

He glanced at her. He’d seen the fresco “Soul Taking” that she talked about. It was a bunch of gray demons with claws, wings, and tails who tore the souls from both the living and the dead. It was a grotesque carnival of pain and torment that had always made Colesceau giggle, even as a child. He thought his mother was psychologically misshapen, to get passion out of something that frightful and comedic.

...the rules of common sense. Always lock your car. Always park in a well-lit place. Always check your car before getting in — especially the backseat...

He looked at Merci Rayborn’s mouth as she spoke, then at Helena’s. He liked to compare his mother’s features with the features of women he might possess someday. Merci Rayborn had even white teeth. Helena had tusks. He pressed down with his forearm just a little, but the resistance was gone. For the millionth time in the last three years it simply evaporated, like a drop of spring rain on a warm sidewalk. It was the single most infuriating feeling he had ever known.

... why will we get him? Because creeps like this aren’t usually too bright, that’s why we’ll get him...

CNB went back to “Rape Watch: Irvine” and Trudy appeared on the screen. Helena grabbed the remote and turned down the sound.

“It is time to put your mother to bed, Moros.”

“Of course.”

He tucked his mother into his own bed. It flattered her to get his bed — though she also seemed to feel entitled to it — and he favored the arrangement for other reasons. He felt the tip of the ice pick in the darkness to make sure it was there.

He took off her babushka and stroked her hair, which was wispy white with brown on top, like meringue. He listened to her ramble. He knew she’d be stubbornly unconscious in a matter of minutes. He pulled up the covers so they were just covering her breasts, tucking them in nice and snug around her, just as she liked it, just as she’d taught him to do.

“You are the good son, Moros.”

“You are the good mother.”

Her mouth approximated a smile and he bent to kiss her. He felt the tip of the pick against his hip and he knew this was the time. His arms were trembling like he’d just lifted a car off the ground.

He thought so often about it. Not so much the beneficial results, but the pleasure the act would give him. But he could never do it. He had had a thousand chances in two different countries on two different continents over two decades, and he had still never been able to do it. He hated himself for this failure. The hatred of himself was his bedrock, the foundation on which everything else inside him was built. There was no escaping it when she was near him.

And now she was threatening to move in.

Helpless to stop her. Helpless to end her. The hatred made thin, red outlines like halos around everything he looked at.

... because creeps like this aren’t usually too bright, that’s why we’ll get him...

Colesceau shut the door on his already snoring mother, went downstairs and poured a giant cocktail of pure vodka. Then he went back upstairs and into the spare bedroom, locking the door behind him. He was weeping though he wasn’t sad, and he could feel the cool tears on his cheeks.

It had been like this for three years. His body did one thing, and his mind did another. No connection. No unity. It was strange to feel rage and anger, but to have no erection; to feel furious and frustrated, but to have tears running down his face.

He stripped down to his underwear and stood in front of the mirrored wall. He set the tumbler on the floor beside him. He wanted to see himself now that the hormone treatments were stopped. He unbuttoned the shirt, realizing with a sense of dread that this was the worst he would look, that the effects were as bad now as they would get.

This is what they have made of me. Manhood shot through with womanhood and the result is neither.

So he dropped the shirt, pulled off his underwear and looked at himself in the glass. He saw that his general shape was suggestive of the human female rather than the human male. He saw the deep pocks the dog teeth had left, and the jagged suture scars guaranteed by disinterested government doctors. Before the police dogs his skin had been pale and clear and taut. He saw his flabby midsection, the valiant little breasts trying so hard not to become what they were not intended to be. Before the hormone treatments they had been flat, efficient ministers of strength. He saw the loose nest of hair and skin between his legs. Before all of this they had been his precious cock and balls, they had always been there for him, they had been him when he needed them to be — his expression of hate, desire, rage. Now they were an image of pure defeat. And no matter what he imagined, he couldn’t get even the faintest stirring of desire to register down there. For now, as it was so often in the last three years, his organ was nothing more than a phantom.

He stooped and got his vodka, draining it down to the last cold drop.

Then everything hit him. The hatred and rage, the desire and impotence, the frustration and weakness. All of it stewed in the vodka and progesterone, all of it mixed together into a toxic blend.

Colesceau opened his mouth and bared his teeth. He trapped the scream far down in his throat and didn’t let it out His head rang with pain. He could feel his own hot damp breath all around his face and see the steam it formed in the air-conditioned room. Like he was breathing smoke.

He looked at himself again and saw the thing he had become. He drew another breath and choked down another soundless scream. The glass broke in his hand and he felt the ice landing around his toes.

And he had the vision — while his head roared with a silent bellow of despair — of what he would do next.

To establish himself again. To better himself.

To show his mother and the miserable world that he could rise above what they had made of him.

He thought it through and he thought it through again. He watched his face, still a grimace of tears and a frozen scream. So much to do now, and so little time.

Trudy’s number was still in the Bible in his living room, and he’d need to leave a little something for his mother.

Work to do.