Benjamin the Coward

Ever since he was a teenager, Benjamin had felt that there was something heavy inside him, like a round polished stone, which had to be dug out before he could be free. He had always wanted to be weightless, but over time the stone had only grown heavier. The stone was a sadness, and the sadness was a sickness, and over time the sickness had manifested itself, he knew, as a physical growth somewhere behind his heart. The question was how to get rid of the stone. Two fantasies played out in his mind. In the first, he saw himself lying across a railway track, positioned carefully so that the wheels of the train would slice directly through his heart. In the second, he stood half naked before a woman who stripped his skin from his body, layer after layer, until the rounded tip of the stone appeared and she could pluck it out with her fingernails.

Benjamin was afraid. To begin with, he was afraid of the stone itself. It had been sitting there, growing heavier, for nearly a quarter of a century. Little by little it had accumulated the detritus of a lifetime: guilt, remorse, unexplored grief, his failures, his lies, love lost, love abandoned, love destroyed. He was also afraid of the pain that dislodging the stone would cause. He knew it would not come in a single rush, instant and short-lived. It would arrive in surges, each one worse than the last as the stone was tugged and pulled and the truth wrenched out of him. He knew it would continue for days, even weeks, until his body became limp and his mind empty.

It occurred to him that the stone was also a kind of plug, like a chunk of granite holding back the well-spring of his nature. He could imagine this nature – he had even experienced it at brief moments, usually by chance, when he had found the state of mind necessary to rise above the heaviness of the stone. It was similar to the feeling of being god – a momentary knowledge of his innocence in the universe, of himself as something separate from thought, experience, attachments and identity. When he felt like this his heart sang: a single, high note like the note of a bell but continuous, something that might be heard drifting across a valley from a monastery high in the mountains.

It was this Benjamin – heavy, filled with an unknown grief – who woke one morning in his twenty-second floor apartment on West Seventeenth Street, put on a clean shirt and a pair of slacks, made tea and sat at the kitchen table watching the city grow light outside his window. To an observer there was no sign of the heavy stone inside him. He was too careful. He watched himself at each moment and was conscious of every action, even his own breathing. He was a balancing act, a tightrope walker who kept one eye on his actions and the other on the festering wound in his heart. After finishing his tea he rinsed the cup under the tap, filled a shoulder bag with a novel, a notebook, pens, a cellphone and an i-pod, then left the apartment and headed towards the subway two blocks from his home.

That was the morning that he met a woman on the train. She was sitting alone at the end of the carriage, perfectly still, with a face of quiet intensity and concentration. She wasn't reading, or checking her watch, or scrolling through messages on her cellphone. She wasn't doing anything atall, except staring straight ahead, out of the window. When the shifting crowds forced him to stand directly in front of her, their eyes met briefly and he knew instantly that he should stay with her and never let her out of his sight. When she got up to leave the train, he followed her. There was nothing else he could do. They walked up a winding staircase to the surface of the city – a bright blue day that blinded their eyes after the darkness under ground. She walked east, following small streets that ran through tenements of houses with rows of sycamores outside. Benjamin stayed several paces behind, careful to walk without appearing to follow her. The stone throbbed gently inside him, and each throb released a small surge of pain.

They entered a side-street lined with restaurants and coffee shops. For a moment she disappeared as she rounded a corner by a hot-dog stand, and when he saw her again she was even further off, moving quickly through a crowd of commuters. He jogged now, remembering her eyes that had looked at him briefly in the train. The split second glance had been enough to know that she could understand him, even without words. She turned into a narrow alley, quiet and hidden from the sun, where steam rose from underground kitchens. Even in this backstreet she seemed to know exactly where she was going. From time to time her figure was lost in shadow – merging with the darkness of doorways, and then reappearing in the shafts of sunlight that fell through the gaps between tenements.

It was in one of these intermittent wedges of shadow that he seemed to lose her completely. Far ahead of him her form merged with the shadows and vanished, and instead of reappearing in sunlight as it had before, it remained hidden. He jogged to where she had disappeared but there was no sign of her, and no sign of her in the sunlight up ahead. For a minute he remained still, convinced that she must be standing in the darkness, half visible among the crates and bags of waste; but as his eyes adjusted it became clear that there was no other living thing there but himself.

“Hey. Are you looking for someone?” The voice came from a doorway behind him – it was her. She was standing with her hands deep in her coat pockets and looking at him quizzically, a half-smile playing on her face.

Benjamin had no idea what to say. Now that she had discovered him, now that he was standing in front of the woman he was sure he needed, he couldn't say what it was he wanted.

“I just – need to talk to you”, he said hesitantly.

He knew he didn't appear threatening. In fact, he was sure he looked a little lost, even sheepish, like a child caught with his hand in a cookie jar.

She hesitated by the doorway, looking him over. She was breathing quickly, and seemed afraid, but didn't try to leave.

"What's it about?" she said - but before he could answer, she seemed to change her mind. "Well, forget it."

The words seemed unconnected to anything. For a moment her face was blank, the worry and fear wiped clean.

Then she said: “Well, there's a coffee place round the corner. We can talk there if you like.”

The coffee shop was at the corner of East Fourteenth Street and Divine. An icy wind was blowing and they leaned into each other as they crossed the street. They sat at a corner table and ordered lattes. The conversation flowed easily, but she told him almost nothing about herself, not even her name. Instead, she asked him a series of questions, so that after an hour he had told her some of his deepest and longest held secrets almost without effort. It was as easy as explaining the plot of the latest movie. He felt no embarrassment or shame at anything he told her. For the first time since he was a teenager, he was able to speak his heart and mind without being afraid.

About two hours into the conversation he began to feel the pain in his chest. The sensation was of the skin over his heart tightening, like an elastic sheet being stretched until the surface begins to split. He could feel the stone pushing upwards against his heart, cutting the blood flow and making him breathless and faint. Half way through his second latte, feverish and sweating, he excused himself to go to the bathroom. In front of the mirror he unbuttoned his shirt and discovered a large grey-blue bruise, about the diameter of a baseball, over his heart. Tracing it with his fingertips he discovered that it had a hardened crust rising about a millimetre from the surface of his skin. When he pressed it he felt a mixture of nausea, sadness, disgust and regret. It was as if by pressing the bruise he was making the stone underneath – and everything it contained – shift and stir, bringing hidden secrets sharply into focus. He found that by pressing it in certain ways he could explore each of those secrets, or a combination of them, in turn. At the same time, his pressing and prodding brought back memories that he had refused to acknowledge for many years.

For a few minutes, with his shirt still open, he held onto the basin and cried. Then he buttoned his shirt, rinsed his face in cold water, dried himself with a paper towel, took a deep breath and walked back to the table.

That afternoon they slept together. He made sure that the lights were low so that she wouldn't notice the bruise. Whenever her hands moved towards his chest in the dark, he took them in his own and kissed her fingers, then drew her arms above her head, holding down her wrists while he thrust himself inside her. He made love to her as if she was the last woman he would ever make love to, and just before he came, she cried out, “My name is Eliana. When you come, call out my name.”

He called out her name.

They fell asleep, and he dreamed that he was naked, on all fours, crouched on rocks by the edge of the sea. The waves came in fast, and the ice-cold foam washed over him. The sea was metallic and black and his knees were bleeding, cut open by dead coral on the surface of the rock. But the pain was irrelevant because a few feet away – across a deep chasm – lay his heart, bloody and pink, on top of a high cliff. He was trying to reach his heart but the chasm separated them, and there was a hole in his chest where his heart should have been. He could smell his heart – mixed with the smell of kelp and seagull shit and salt – but the chasm was too dark and frightening to jump into, and he remained paralyzed on the rock, shivering and with the blood seeping out of his knees.

When he woke it was dark and he was alone. He could hear faint sounds in the kitchen. He turned on his side, and was about to swing his feet to the floor when he felt the soft liquid under his fingers. At first he thought it was his own semen, but realized immediately that there was too much of it. The wetness, which was like a thick, cold broth, had spread across the bottom sheet from the level of his neck down to his navel. Exploring with his fingers, he traced the liquid from its outer boundaries upwards to his chest. He felt a sickness rising in his throat and found himself shaking. When his fingers touched the bruise, they discovered that the dry crust had split open in several places, and that a thick, warm liquid had flowed through the cracks and was slowly congealing.

He switched on the bedside lamp and saw that the sheets were soaked in blood. He could hear her moving around in the kitchen, and he quickly gathered up the sheets to rinse them in the bathroom, so that she would never see the blood or know the extent of his wound. But before he reached the bathroom, which was across the hallway that led to the kitchen, she appeared at the kitchen door. Apart from a short apron she was naked, and she held a spatula in her right hand. From behind her came the sound of vegetables frying, and the sharp smells of garlic and ginger.

She glanced at the bundle of sheets that he was holding, and he knew that there was nothing he could hide from her. He let the sheets slide to the floor and stood naked in front of her, his body white apart from the large red wound in the middle of his chest.

A change came into her eyes – a hardness softening, as if she recognized something she had been anticipating for a long time. She walked towards him, and with the spatula still in her hand, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her lips to his ear.

“So it's really happening”, she whispered. “You poor thing. You poor little boy.”

Her breath in his ear made him grow hard, and he pressed her against the hallway and made love to her there, not caring whether she was hurt, pounding into her swiftly and repeatedly until she came. As he grew near to finishing, he felt the polished stone begin to split and crack inside him. With his teeth on her neck he shut his eyes and imagined that the stone was connected by some invisible vein to the base of his penis. He imagined that as he swelled in the moments before he came, the stone would also swell and crack and burst – a climax of pleasure accompanied by a climax of pain.

Days passed, and apart from the love-making, which was always sudden and urgent, they lived quietly. She would leave the apartment each morning and return in the early afternoon, while he would spend the time reading novels and going for walks and writing in his notebook. He didn't know where she went, and he never asked. She did not belong to him, and he didn't expect anything from her. He relied increasingly on the polished stone to tell him what to do. In the mornings, after she had left, he would sit cross-legged on the living room floor, wearing only his underpants, and he would lay his fingers on the bruise, pressing the surface lightly until something significant was stirred and rose to the surface. Sometimes it would be an old memory, and sometimes it was a feeling of certainty about something that had bothered him, as if the stone was saying, this is what you have to do. Over time he learned to trust these subtle messages, to divine them within the fluid layers of thought and feeling that the stone embodied.

They made love often, always as if it was for the first and last time. At weekends they never left the apartment, but spent the two days eating and making love and sleeping, without getting dressed. Their white bodies were like ghosts moving through the rooms – reading books, chopping vegetables and washing dishes like other people, except that they were always naked. The bruise continued to grow. By the third week the crust had risen half an inch from the surface of his chest, and had expanded to the width of a tennis ball. It bled whenever they made love, and each time, just before he came, he remembered something new. The memories were random, but each one contained a vital element that for a long time he had refused to acknowledge. He learned that everything, no matter how small, is significant. He learned that the glance of a stranger he will never see again is just as important as a chance meeting with a long-lost friend.

One afternoon as they were making love, the stone – polished and heavy and gleaming – slipped through the wound and fell onto her breasts. It was warm and dry, and when they turned it over in their hands it responded to their touch by changing color. She placed the stone on the mantlepiece, from where it continued to give off a faint, orange glow. A different kind of light came from the hole in Benjamin's chest – a muddy, uncertain light which sputtered every now and then, as if his connection to the source was weak. It was not the feeling of god that he had expected – that had been an illusion. Over the next few days, Benjamin learned that his true nature was a combination of ugliness and beauty, an uneasy alliance which escaped definition, shifting and evolving like a virus trying to outrun its fate.

In the morning the polished stone on the mantlepiece had shrunk by a few millimetres, and its light had weakened. Benjamin woke with the feeling of weightlessness he had longed for since the end of his childhood – but now that it was there, it was not the feeling he had imagined. His body seemed to be without substance – a shell enclosing a core which had been ripped out, leaving nothing but air. It was the feeling of being out of focus – as if anyone who chose to look at him would not be able to see him clearly. He rose giddily from the bed and walked to the kitchen table, where Eliana was sitting cross-legged, wrapped in a kimono. It was the first time, since he had known her, that she had worn clothes at breakfast. From the way she smiled at him he knew at once that everything had changed. They ate in silence, and everything at the table – down to the knives and forks, and the tablecloth – seemed to be tinged with sadness. The salt cellar, the slices of bread, the jar of marmalade, all seemed to be filled with sorrow. Eliana nibbled on a slice of toast that she had buttered half-heartedly, and her face was whiter than before. She left at eight o'clock as usual, and said goodbye without looking at him.

He discovered the note later that morning, sitting on the mantlepiece next to the stone. Written in her neat, rounded handwriting, it told him that there was nothing else she could do for him. “We have to find our own way now”, it said. “I'm sorry for everything, and I'm glad for everything. Eliana.”

He sat in his place on the living room floor, letting his fingers trace the skin that had started to grow over his wound. After an hour he packed a knapsack with some basic provisions – a small bottle of soy milk, half a loaf of bread, a box of matches and a change of clothes. Then he left the apartment, which vanished behind him along with his days and nights with Eliana. If he had been able to walk back that way a week later, he would not have found the apartment, or even the street on which it had stood, because the moment he stopped thinking about them, they ceased to exist.

Carrying the still warm stone in his pocket he rode the subway to the last stop, a few miles beyond the furthest suburbs of the city. The station was above ground, and the tracks ran past a wide expanse of beach covered in rolling dunes, beyond which was the sea. He showed his ticket to the guard, who later reported to the police that the man had a dishevelled, unfocused look - “as if he wasn't all there.” The tide was a mile offshore. Benjamin walked towards the sea, skirting the dunes until he had a clear view of the water. He found a hollow in the sand, dropped his knapsack there, and gathered some driftwood to make a fire. By the time it was dark, the embers were glowing and the sky was filled with stars.

Sitting with his back to the dune, it was difficult to make out the precise point at which the sea met the sky. He could see the white crests of waves close to the beach, but toward the horizon the greyness of sea folded into the blackness of sky, and it was hard to distinguish between them. He tried to guess where the point might be – the point where things changed, where one certainty turned into another – but the harder he looked, the more he felt his eyes were playing tricks on him.

He took the polished stone out of his pocket, and out of his knapsack he drew a small penknife which he had found in a kitchen drawer at Eliana's apartment. He unbuttoned his shirt, and the new skin over his wound shone yellow in the moonlight. Placing the blade directly over his heart he made the first of a series of incisions, cutting deeper until he had carved out a hole equal in shape and size to the stone. He dug out the flesh by scarring it like the skin of a fish, first in one direction then in the other, before laying the blade of the knife flat against the scars and slicing the skin layer by layer, using his thumb as a lever as if he was peeling an apple. It was slow work because he was afraid of the pain – but gradually the flesh came away.

The fisherman who discovered him the next morning, just after first light, reported to the police that the man – who had looked like a beached fish from a distance, “maybe a tuna or a baby whale” - had been struggling to breathe. He had fallen sideways onto the sand, and his right hand was trying to press the stone back into the hole in his chest. The fisherman didn't tell the police that the stone had glowed briefly before turning black – he kept that part to himself. He also didn't mention that when he had asked him his name, the man who resembled a beached fish had summoned just enough strength to whisper: “Benjamin. My name is Benjamin the coward.” There was something about the words that the fisherman knew the cops would never understand. He didn't understand them either – but he was wise enough to know that some things were better left unsaid.