33.

No one wanted a haircut. Mano didn’t want to give anyone a haircut. He wanted only to feel his own clunky weight grow and settle into his own barber’s chair, and he wanted to swivel in it, back and forth, back and forth, like the slow metronome he held somewhere on his body, in and out of the little parallelogram of sun that sat in his lap and reflected off the more metallic objects there—the saw, the radio Pepe had given him, the clock of his mother’s that Mitzi had returned to him.

Outside of his window, a crowd of people had gathered in the street, but they were just more shapes. He didn’t care why they were gathering, and he didn’t leave his barbershop to ask. Without his glasses, he had no idea which shape belonged to which person. He had no idea that the shape of the one crawling on the ground at everyone’s feet was Mitzi’s. And he didn’t care. Blurs in the stupid light.

As Mano swiveled in his chair, he caught a glimpse of the black square on the wall in the back room. For the first time, he could see a body in it. He couldn’t see a face, but he could definitely see a body, and the body was getting bigger and bigger as he looked at it. The body was becoming bigger than the black square itself. The body was no longer even the shape of a person. It kept growing until it was bigger than the black square. It filled the entire back room and then it filled the barbershop. It grew and grew until it wasn’t even a shape at all, but a feeling. The feeling took up all the space in the barbershop around Mano’s body. And then the feeling became Mano’s body.

Mano looked down at his own body. It was far too big. It was so big, there was hardly any space for the chair to swivel and recline. His size had become freakish, and could not be ignored by even his most loyal customers. His head and shoulders had collapsed inward toward his own center. His body was its own cage. The things he held settled into his body until they became his body. They felt nothing at all like love anymore. He held onto them only because he didn’t quite know how to let them go.

Mano straightened what had become of his legs to rise from his barber’s chair. He walked into the back room. He pushed his nose against the black square. “Are you in there, Pepe? Will you show me your face?”

Pepe showed his face inside of the black square.

Mano wanted to go inside the black square with Pepe, but the black square was just a black square and nothing else. “I can’t come in there with you,” Mano said. He couldn’t hear Pepe say anything back. He couldn’t hear a voice. He couldn’t remember what Pepe’s voice sounded like. And he couldn’t remember Pepe’s smell either. How is it we can lose a sound or a smell so easily once someone is gone, but their face—their face is always right there, floating in front of our own to haunt us, to taunt us back into a realm that doesn’t really even exist, and where we aren’t even welcome if it did.

Mano pushed his nose into the black square against Pepe’s own nose, and breathed in like that so deeply, he almost lost his balance. He wanted to breathe in the whole world, but couldn’t. There was no smell he recognized in that air other than the smell of the living.

Then Mano finally asked what he had meant to ask. “Are you in there, Mano? Will you show me your face?” Mano dug around into the mess of his own body, and found the radio Pepe had given him. He turned it on. He wanted to hear Pepe inside of it, from very deep in the future, maybe playing a polka, but instead some priest’s voice inside of the radio said, “Do you feel his love?”

“No, I don’t,” answered Mano. “I don’t feel it.”

Mano could only feel the weight of the radio asking the question. It was just a radio. It was just a radio. It was just a radio. He threw it at the black square.

The black square cracked perfectly in half. A new horizon right in front of Mano’s eyes split the world inside the black square into a top half and a bottom half. The top half of the black square fell onto Mano’s head. It was heavy. Mano saw a sharp bright white light—a bolt of lightning behind his eyes. He kept his eyes closed to will death into taking him further into the darkness beyond the lightning bolt.

Beulah Minx was suddenly standing above him. She helped him lift the top half of the broken black square off of his head. She stood there, silently, waiting to see if Mano could still talk.

“What do you want?” Mano squinted at her.

“We’re looking for Father Felipe.”

Mano could barely understand Beulah. She spoke with the kind of voice that she, herself, had never before heard. “Who?”

“Father Felipe. Was he getting his haircut?” Beulah tried again.

“I can’t look for anything. I don’t have my glasses,” Mano said. He didn’t know if it was Beulah’s deafness or his sore head that was causing her voice to muddy and echo in his ears. He knew only that Beulah could understand how it must feel to not only not remember a voice, but to have never even known a voice, and to have never even known your own. Mano thought she had asked him something about his father. “What about my father?”

Beulah stood there, perplexed, not answering his question.

“Father?” he said loudly, exaggerating his lips so they could be read. “Fah...thurrr.”

Beulah was staring at his mouth.

Then she tried again. “Far...ther...Far...lee...pay,” she said again, but more carefully this time.

“Who is Father Farlipe?” Mano asked.

Beulah shrugged her shoulders and turned around to walk back out into the crowd on the street. As she left, she looked down at the black poodle that was born from the death hole of her dead husband, The Postman.

“There you are! There you are!” she exclaimed in a voice that to Mano sounded like, “Dear, war! Dear, war!” Beulah picked up the poodle, tucked it under her arm, and walked back out onto Last Street.

Mano felt so alone. Dear, war. Dear, war. In these trenches, we can’t trust even our own eyes upon the loyal.